


Rise and move again

by praycambrian



Series: In another time [1]
Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Betrayal, Bisexuality, Canon-Typical Violence, Coming Out, Crimes & Criminals, Family, Grief/Mourning, Homecoming, Homophobia, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Marriage, Photographs, Presumed Dead, Secrets
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-05
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-02-28 03:47:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22567312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/praycambrian/pseuds/praycambrian
Summary: “I watched them bury a box I thought had your ashes in it,” Ava said. “Tell me why, Raylan Givens.”After each learns the other didn’t die in 1992, Raylan needs twenty hours, a good deal more than twenty ounces of booze, and a lot of help to make a decision Boyd makes in twenty minutes.
Relationships: Ava Crowder/Boyd Crowder (past), Boyd Crowder/Raylan Givens, Raylan Givens/OMC, Raylan Givens/Winona Hawkins (past)
Series: In another time [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1745533
Comments: 37
Kudos: 109





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This work includes non-graphic and mildly graphic discussion of canon-typical abuse and violence (including hate crimes and domestic violence) as well as one scene of non-graphic, consensual sex which includes some physical aggression. There are also a couple instances of homophobic slurs and a brief mention of miscarriage. If you have a question about anything tagged, feel free to reach out for me to elaborate. 
> 
> With many thanks to the Justified fic writers whose work has informed and inspired this one. #latetotheparty

Despite the circumstances, Dan insisted on a sendoff with a few people from the office, the ones who were assholes enough to be friendly with Raylan but not such assholes they were going to give him too much shit about the whole Tommy Bucks situation. 

Raylan showed up buzzed on account of having enlisted the help of a bottle of bourbon to pack up his apartment that afternoon. But it turned out he wasn’t in the mood for more of it. At one point Dan tried to order him something and Raylan waved him off.

“Raylan Givens, turning down a drink?” Dan’s eyes were sharp over his mostly-full martini.

“Feels like drinking at my own funeral,” Raylan said.

“Jesus, drama queen. You’re not drunk enough to be talking like that.”

“Well, ain’t nothing worse than flying hungover, and someone booked me a flight at eight in the morning.” Raylan pointed a french fry accusingly. “Couldn’t wait to get rid of me, huh?” 

“I just don’t want you shooting anyone else or getting shot anywhere I might have to deal with it.”

“You’re all heart.”

“Damn right. Tell you what, I’ll prove it to you.” Dan motioned to the bartender. “A round for the house? Thanks. Get out of here,” he said, turning back to Raylan. “You’re terrible at speeches, and I don’t think there’s anything you want to say to any of us that you haven’t said already at some point in the last six years.”

Raylan looked down, twisting his ring. 

“Mm,” he said. “Suppose you’re right.” 

He knocked back the shot the bartender slid in front of him and saluted Dan with the empty glass. 

Dan offered his hand. “I’d say it’s been a pleasure, but…” 

Raylan smirked. “But,” he agreed, collecting his hat. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“You mean, like thinking twice? I’ll do my best.” Dan held that gimlet gaze on him a moment longer. “Take care of yourself, Raylan.” 

The night was still warm, sticky. Pockets of quiet opened here and there between the strangers passing on the street: Raylan could hear the breeze brushing the palms’ limp fronds, the car tires hushing against the wet asphalt. 

Somebody shouted with laughter and his hand flexed hard on his holster. 

He’d already signed his car back over to the Marshal service pool, so he took a bus east across the bay. There was no question Gio had someone after him: it had been a public affront. Raylan felt like he was staking out the whole city, a pleasant tension that turned his thoughts from the plane ticket, the tightness in his throat. They always pulled first. Once you got down to it, it was all just a question of waiting. 

He tilted his hat against the bus’s harsh lights, watching. That man with the backpack? Those tough boys with their bare arms, leaning into each other? 

No. Gio wouldn’t keep homos around—but then again, with some people you couldn’t tell. 

“You got a problem, man?” said the shorter one. He had a diamond in one ear. 

“Nah,” said Raylan. He let his eyes slide up and down them, let his mouth loosen at the edge. It was easy; it was okay to use it sometimes, on cases. They laughed.

“Ah, I see how it is,” said the other one, willow-lean. “You wanna do something other than look, cowboy, we’re partying all night.”

“That’s very kind. But this is my stop.”

Diamond shrugged. “Your loss.” 

They didn’t let people on the beach after dark, so Raylan had the sand to himself—though in Miami, even the dark wasn’t dark, smeared with lights of all colors, the glittering high-rises and the flickering lamps studding the dunes and the orange clouds hanging over the ocean. The sound of the waves was the only way it was like the mine: the sense of some massive, killing thing breathing just out of reach. 

He’d almost wanted to say something at the bar, when Dan asked without asking. It was still pushing up in his throat. He’d never told anyone. Not even Winona, who’d begged him, who deserved it if anyone did. 

He reached the pier at the end of the beach and turned north again. The breeze smelled of saltwater and trash as it lifted the sweat from his neck. 

After another hour he was back where he’d started, thinking of calling it a night—his gaze kept flicking to every twitch of the palm trees’ weird, thin shadows—and then someone emerged from the dune grass just behind him, calling out, “Hey, cowboy!”

Raylan turned with his hand on his Glock, already smiling. It was the diamond boy from the bus. Looked like Gio was one of the ones you couldn’t tell with after all. 

“You following me?”

But the kid was raising his hands, eyes wide, and there didn’t really look to be room for a gun in the painted-on tank and shorts he was wearing. 

“Whoa, hey, no, man. I’m not following you, I just went for a walk to have a smoke, I recognized the hat, that’s all. I’ll leave, I can leave now, okay?”

Raylan let go of the gun, showed him the star instead. “Calm down, kid,” he said, “I ain’t gonna shoot you.” 

“Look at what I look like, dude, you flashing a badge isn’t exactly reassuring.” He was still standing there, motionless. “Can I put my hands down?”

“I told you, I ain’t gonna shoot you.”

When the kid dropped his arms, the rest of him dropped too, and he put his head on his knees in the sand. He seemed a little drunk. “Jesus _Christ,_ man.”

“Look, sorry,” Raylan said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. It’s just I’m pretty sure a mob boss wants me dead, and in my experience there’s only two reasons people come at me all of a sudden out of the dark, so—”

“Yeah?” The guy’s breathing was starting to even out. “What, either to shoot you or to…?”

“Well,” drawled Raylan, and the kid finally laughed. 

Raylan reached down a hand to help him up. His palm was warm, callused, damp with sweat. Raylan let go, brushed the sand off. 

“Thanks.” The guy looked at him, then past him at the empty beach. “I, uh, know they don’t want people out this time of night, but is it cool if I have that smoke? I could fucking use it.”

“I won’t tell if you won’t.”

“Uh-huh.” Diamond tapped loose a cigarette—apparently there was room for something else in his shorts after all—and shrugged when Raylan shook his head at the offered carton. “Come on, you at least owe me the story, man. Why’s a mob boss want you dead? You sleep with his boy or something?”

The kid was playing it cool, but he fumbled a bit trying to flick the lighter. Raylan leaned in, cupped a hand around the flame till it caught. 

“Nah. Killed one of his gun thugs. Suppose he feels he’s gotta send a message back.”

“So you decided you’d stand around by yourself on the beach in the dark, make it easy for him.” Diamond turned his head, blew out a puff of smoke. When Raylan glanced at him, he was already looking back, dark eyes steady. Maybe not such a kid. “Shit, man. You really should’ve come with us for that drink.”

“Tend not to like drinking with strangers.” 

The kid offered his hand. After a second Raylan shook it. 

“Dion.”

“Raylan.” 

“Now we’re not strangers, are we.”

“Suppose not.” Raylan’s voice sounded like a stranger’s. “What happened to your friend?” 

“He got lucky.”

“Ah.” Raylan looked away as if he was just turning his face from the smoke. “You know that shit’ll kill you.”

Dion smiled again. “It can try. Sure you don’t want a drag?” And Raylan hadn’t smoked in twenty years, but he drew the cigarette from Dion’s slim fingers and brought it to his mouth. 

“Yep. Still hate it.” He blew out the smoke quickly, grimacing, and Dion laughed. 

“I know, it’s a filthy habit. I only smoke when I drink. But then again, I drink a lot.”

A few cars honked on the other side of the dunes. The breeze had died down a little. “Where I come from,” Raylan found himself saying, “all the miners smoke like chimneys.”

“Yeah?”

"They know it’ll kill them sure as the coal dust will, maybe even quicker, but at least it tastes better going down.”

“That’s sad as shit, man. Where you from, West Virginia?”

“Harlan. Kentucky.”

Dion was holding the cigarette just shy of his lips, as if he was waiting for his own hand to move. “Must have been tough, growing up there.” 

Raylan laughed. He couldn’t help it. “Dion, you have no idea.” 

“You know, I bet I do.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Raylan looked away. He hooked one hand in his belt and the other on his holster. That bitter thing rose thick in his throat again, all the night’s work ruined, and he thought, _fuck it, he pulled first—_

“You know—” He cleared his throat. Out in the dark that wasn’t dark, a tiny red light flared like a distant fire, and inside their own cup of darkness, Dion’s attention beat on his skin crisp as heat from a flame. 

“You know,” Raylan said, “when people do the kind of thing to you, killing would be too kind for them?” 

“I do.” 

“Well, that’s Harlan.” 

“Yeah,” said Dion softly, “that sounds about right.” 

Dion was looking at him still. Raylan ducked, lifted his hat to rake fingers through his hair, kept the hat in hand. He’d come looking for the opposite of this.

“So it was, uh, tough for you, too?”

It was Dion’s turn to laugh. “It’s always tough for us, anywhere.”

After a moment he stubbed out the cigarette in the sand, and when he rose he looked Raylan in the eye. 

“Let me ask you something.” His voice was knife-steady, so intent Raylan almost stepped back. “You killed that mob guy. I’m guessing you killed other people before too.” 

He waited for Raylan to nod. 

“You ever kill the people who hurt you?”

Raylan couldn’t lie to him. “No.”

Dion ran his tongue over his teeth. “I thought for sure you would have,” he said. His gaze searched Raylan as if he could read the answer he wanted in the patches of sweat on Raylan’s shirt, the empty hat, the dull glint on his star and the ring on his right hand. “I thought you could tell me what it was like.”

“I can tell you plenty about killing. Just not that kind. I’m sorry,” Raylan said. “I wish I could. I wanted to. But I waited too long.” 

“I wanted to, too.” 

“What stopped you?”

“I didn’t want to be like them.” 

Dion’s face was close, wrenched with something Raylan recognized but couldn’t name. His eyes were shining, his cheeks gleaming in the blue lamplight, his whole shadowed body nearly wet with light, and Raylan realized: _beautiful_. 

“And I’m not,” Dion said. “I’m here. I won.” 

“I’m starting to think I didn’t,” Raylan confessed, and then Dion’s mouth was pressing on his—warm, sour with smoke, sweet as the breeze, kissing Raylan, kissing him, and Raylan put his free hand on the side of Dion’s neck, stroking the warm jaw and the short rasping hair behind the ear, kissing back, his other hand clenched hard on his hat, while behind them the black ocean breathed and breathed. 

Six hours later he was in the airport, watching planes fall in and out of the pink sky. Six hours after that he was home. 

Home. _Where they have to take you back,_ Dion had said, one arm beneath the pillow, and Raylan agreed: _even if only to bury you._

It already felt like something that had happened to someone else, in another life. 

Raylan took a cab to the courthouse, signed out a town car, and drove grids through Lexington for a couple hours, familiarizing himself, before he stopped at the first motel that didn’t border a highway. He unpacked his suitcase and went out for cheap Chinese and a bottle of bourbon. He went down to his jeans and undershirt on the pilled sheets and ground out a couple hours of sleep to make up for the night before. Eventually he’d stalled as long as he could. 

He had to work at it a little to check for tails on the way back to the office, squinting through the blunt orange sunset filling his mirrors.

“You’re two days early,” Art Mullen said when Raylan walked into the office. 

He looked about the same as he had at Glynco. Maybe a little slimmer, his hair maybe a little whiter, but he’d been bald and scowly as long as Raylan had known him. If Raylan had to be in Kentucky it was good to at least see a familiar face he probably wouldn’t have to shoot. 

Raylan didn’t answer with the truth, which was that he had no taste for dragging out what felt like a death sentence. “What can I say, I missed you.”

“Uh huh. I’m sure it had nothing to do with Dan Grant hustling you out of Miami like your ass was on fire.” There were only three other people around, working at their desks, and Art waved Raylan past them into his office. “Tell me about the shooting.” 

“He pulled first. I shot him. It was justified.” Raylan settled back in a chair facing the desk as Art went to the safe in the corner and pulled out a bottle of bourbon. 

“And the twenty-four-hour Tombstone bullshit?” 

“You wondering if I’m liable to fly off the handle, Art?” 

Art poured two glasses, nudging one across the desk, then tilting his back and forth in his hand for a moment before he said, “You know, Winona works here. At the courthouse.”

“Is that so.” Raylan took a long sip. 

“She didn’t tell me much about the divorce. But seems like part of it was about you getting a little closer to the edge than you ought to, once or twice.”

Raylan drew a thumb across his lips. He felt like Art could see it like a stain on his face: what he’d done wrong. What he was. 

“I watched Tommy Bucks tape a lit stick of dynamite into a coconut farmer’s mouth and watch,” Raylan said at last. “Man like that, no doubt he’d kill again. I just made sure I happened to be around the next time he tried.”

Art gave him a long look. “Hmm. Well, as fate would have it, there’s bad guys blowing shit up around here, too.” He pulled a file from a drawer, leafing through it. “U.S. Attorney’s trying to build a case against this one winning fella, neo-Nazi crime lord type, blows up a car or a bridge or something then robs a bank while everyone’s looking the other way. I think he does it just for kicks, Lord knows he’s already got all the oxy and weed business, the racket and whatever else. Did a few years for some tax evasion sovereign citizen bullshit, but nothing else sticks to him, the slippery bastard. None of us can crack these Harlan people. Guy’s a local boy, about your age, name of Boyd Crowder, you know him?”

Raylan didn’t make a sound. Everything in him was suddenly far away, sucked up: the gasp of air tearing down the shaft of a mine about to blow. 

“I take it you do know him,” Art said after a moment. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” 

“I thought he was dead.” 

“You two close?”

“We worked a deep mine together for a couple years. You get to know a man.”

“So you were buddies?”

“Not exactly. I just—never thought I’d see him again. I thought he was dead,” Raylan said again. 

His voice was coming out mostly steady: muscle memory, deeper than drawing a gun. He’d been lying about Boyd long before he had any other weapon to use. 

“What happened?” 

“There was a—an accident. A fire. Right about the time I left Harlan. I heard it killed him.” Raylan twisted his ring, shrugged. “Suppose I heard wrong.”

He drained the rest of his whiskey in one go, put it back down on the desk maybe a little harder than he’d meant to. Art was still looking at him.

“Is there something you want to tell me about, Raylan?”

“It’s nothing. It’s just—I figured on a little more time before this shit started coming back up at me, that’s all,” Raylan said. “You know I never wanted to come back here. It’s what this place does to you. Takes you, grinds you down till there’s nothing good left.”

“Like Crowder, huh?” Art sighed. “Well, I’m sorry to break the news to you. Not the kind of thing anyone wants to hear about someone they used to know. I hoped you would, but if you’re too close to take point on this…” 

“Nah. You said it yourself, you need someone who understands these people.” Raylan met Art’s eyes, gave him a rueful half-smile: selling it. “Besides, I knew when Dan told me I was coming back to Kentucky that I’d be running into folks from back when. I can handle it.” 

“Well, all right. I won’t say we can’t use the help.” Art passed him the file. “Come on, it’s your first night back. Let me buy you a real drink.” 

“I appreciate it, Art, and I will take you up on it sometime, but tonight I’d rather just get some sleep.” Raylan stood, lightheaded, trying not to show it. “Been a long day.”

Art looked at him again. Raylan felt his pulse beating in his fingertips, his gut. 

“Long week, I bet,” Art said, leaning on his desk. “All right, then, Raylan, I’ll see you tomorrow morning.” 

“Actually, you mind I just head down and check up on this first thing?” Raylan paused at the door, casually. “People will hear I’m in town sooner or later, and I’d rather show up and start asking questions before they’ve had too long to think about the answers.” 

Art raised his eyebrows. “Sure, dive right in. It’ll be good to have you around, Raylan."

“We’ll see if you feel the same way in a week.”

“Hah. Well, Dan warned me about that too.” Art slipped on his reading glasses, the lenses flashing in the light from his desk. “Take care, Raylan.” 

“Yeah,” said Raylan. “You too.”

He sat in the car for a long time, the file open on his lap. 

Boyd’s face was in it. Boyd. His dark hair, his dark eyes, older now; he would’ve turned forty that April. He _had_ turned forty in April. Alive. _Alive_. His expression still clear as clean air to Raylan: that snake-calm face he made when he was waiting for you to realize you’d been in striking distance the whole time. 

_Known white supremacist. Suspected militia recruitment._ He had prison ink: S K I N H E A D across the knuckles, and no ring. 

Raylan piled everything back into the folder and dumped it on the floor on the passenger’s side and started driving.

Pale dawn light was just filtering through the birches when he pulled up at the bridge to Nobles Holler. Two sentries straightened from their slouches against the steel truss, ambling into the road with their shotguns cradled in their arms as he stepped out of the car. 

“Morning, sir,” one called. He was maybe a hair shy of six six and looked like hours standing in the predawn dark hadn’t discomfited him much at all. “Anything in particular we can help you with? Maybe some directions?”

“That’s mighty kind of you, but since I ain’t no poor lost carpetbagger, I can’t say as I’m greatly in need of directions at the moment,” Raylan said politely. “Though I’d be obliged if you could tell Limehouse that Raylan Givens would care for a word.” 

The big one looked him up and down, slower this time. 

“Would you now,” he said. “Excuse me a moment.” 

He stepped back a ways onto the bridge, flipping open a cell phone. The other guy, cap at a jaunty angle, sidled closer to where Raylan was leaning against the car. 

“You from Harlan?”

“Mm.”

“You been gone a while, huh.”

“How could you tell.” 

“Government plates on that fancy car was one good clue,” the guy drawled. “That suit and tie was another. But I’d know you, if you was around here when I was coming up. Weren’t there Givenses over Poor Fork way, ten, fifteen years back? Tight with the Crowders?” 

“Ain’t no Givenses left but me,” Raylan said. “And I don’t know much about Crowders these days.” 

The big guy came back into earshot. “Your lucky day, Mister Givens. Errol here is gonna take you up to talk to Mister Limehouse.” 

“Oh, that’s all right. I remember the way.” 

The big guy smiled. Errol was already going around to the passenger side. “I’m sure you do. But all the same.”

It was cool enough still to leave the windows open, and the sharp smell of woodsmoke filled the car as they wound into the holler. Raylan could feel Errol’s gaze now and then on the side of his face in the silence. 

He parked in front of the restaurant, under the sign: Ellstin’s Joint - BBQ - HOMESTYLE COOKIN’, the neon letters and marquee bulbs empty of light.

“That’s new,” Raylan said, tipping his head at it. 

“Not really,” said Errol. 

Limehouse was out back by the smoker. His broad shoulders were turned to them, but Raylan didn’t doubt he knew they were there. With one last long look, Errol left Raylan standing in the dusty yard with his hands draped in his belt, peering into the billows of blue smoke to see if Limehouse had actually hidden a mirror in there or something, before the big man finally heaved the lid shut and turned. 

He was wearing his battered hat, his sharp eyes glinting out from under it. Raylan had forgotten about that hat. He almost wanted to smile. He touched the brim of his own and nodded. 

“Mister Limehouse.” 

“Mister Givens.”

“It’s Deputy Marshal now, actually.”

Limehouse smiled, toothy. He stooped to hoist a stack of empty red crates into the back of a truck. 

“I know you ain’t coming round after all these years to update me on your career, Deputy Marshal Givens.” Another stack went clattering into the truck bed. “And I know better than to think you’re just here to enjoy a plate of my fine barbecue. In fact, I seem to recall us parting under the understanding that I wasn’t never going to see your face again.”

“Yes, sir, and if I’d had my way you never would. But I know you understand there are some things that are just plain out of a man’s control.” 

Limehouse slid the last stack onto the truck and leaned there, pokerfaced.

“Now when the Marshals Service gave me no choice but to come to Harlan in pursuit of a federal suspect and those who may be harboring him,” Raylan said, replacing his hat, “I come here first not because I think you have anything to do with it, but as a sign of respect to you, on account of the bargain you made with my mama, and the debt I owe you.”

Limehouse barked a laugh. 

“Let us dispense with the pleasantries, Marshal.” He raised his voice, turning back to the smoker. “You came here because you need help, and you know ain’t no one else in Harlan going to give it to you. I’m only surprised you think you’d find it here, either. My arrangement with your mama concluded with her death, God rest her soul, and my arrangement with you was based on you swearing on your own grave that your troubles were never going to come down on me and mine.”

He slammed the lid shut and turned, poker in hand, smoke still coming off it. Raylan set his jaw. 

“Now you walk in here,” Limehouse said, coming forward, “with your gun and your badge, a federal lawman, breaking a peace that’s stood eighteen years, asking me to give you information the telling of which puts everyone in this holler at risk—and you try to butter me up by talking about debts? About respect? Boy, you ain’t become any less of a damn fool.”

He was close enough now Raylan would have to duck hard if that poker swung around. 

“I kept my promise to you,” Raylan said quietly. “I stayed away, I stayed dead. I didn’t even come back for my mama’s funeral.”

“Don’t call it a favor to me, what you did to save your own skin.”

“You want me to beg? You know I can.” Raylan looked at him. “Please, Ellstin. Please tell me where I can find him.”

“So it _is_ about Boyd Crowder,” Limehouse said. “Funny, you lying to my boys saying you ain’t come looking for directions. What you aim to do if you _do_ find him, huh? You gonna shoot him? Ride off into the sunset together? Stay here, use that shiny badge to help him run his Nazi empire?” 

“It don’t matter what I do. Bo’s dead. So’s Arlo.” Limehouse spat at their names. “Ain’t no threat no more. It’s just me and him now. Whatever goes down, none of it’ll come back on you, Ellstin, I swear on my life.”

“And what’s that worth, exactly.” 

“You know, I ain’t sure. But you saved it once, at considerable effort,” Raylan said. “Seems a shame to waste that effort, sending me out of this holler with nothing when you know I’ll have to go knocking on doors hoping I find someone willing to talk before I find the ones willing to shoot. And if I get shot, my chief knowing you were the last place I came, that _will_ come back on you.”

There were warblers singing in the honeysuckle at the far edge of the yard: small, made brave with distance. All those years in cities, he’d forgotten the sound. He kept his gaze on Limehouse’s stony face. 

“I thought about turning you away,” Limehouse said at last. “More than once. Might could’ve, too. Ain’t nothing bout no homos in the understanding we got here with your people.” He tossed the poker clanging back at the smoker. 

Raylan didn’t bother pointing out he wasn’t a homo, exactly. “Well, now,” he said evenly, “if I’d known it bothered you so much, I’d never have let myself get half-dead and in need of your help in the first place.” 

Limehouse scoffed. “You’s just plain trouble. Knew it to see you, even back then. Damn fox snared up, no telling what you gonna tear apart getting free.”

“Ain’t nothing left to get free from.”

“That’s what you think. Nevermind your mama, I should’ve left you sleeping in the damn ground. Be free then.”

“Well, I ain’t sleeping now,” Raylan said. “And I ain’t no damn animal. Make up your mind, Limehouse.”

The man stuck his hands in his coat pockets and watched Raylan a long moment, chin tilted up, and then he ducked and shook his head and whistled once real sharp. Errol poked his head out through the back door, wiping his mouth. 

“Yessir?”

“Take Marshal Givens out to Mrs. Alston’s house. He got some questions for her about Boyd Crowder. Leave that coffee you’s sipping on. You gonna see Marshal Givens here out of Nobles once he’s done.”

“Yessir.”

“If—” Raylan cleared his throat. “If Miss Vivian is around, I’d count it a kindness you let me speak with her as well. Or at least give her my regards.”

Limehouse had turned his back again. He was feeding purple slabs of meat into the smoker, the heat rippling the air around him. “She passed on some years back.”

Raylan ground his heel into the dirt. “I’m truly sorry to hear that.” 

“I sure bet you are.”

“You won’t see me again.”

“Too late for that now.” 

Raylan nodded, mostly to himself. He resettled his hat and turned to where Errol was standing with his sharp eyes. 

They’d nearly left the yard when Limehouse said, “It weren’t your mama’s idea.” 

Raylan looked back. 

“Telling you he’s dead,” Limehouse said. “It was mine.”

The birds were still singing to high heaven in the hedge. When Raylan finally woke up, early in the morning on that second day, he’d heard them first: the warblers out in Miss Vivian’s pink catawbas, so different from the mourning doves of the field that he could tell right away he wasn’t home.

“You’re right,” Raylan said levelly. “You should’ve left me sleeping.” 

Then he turned and got back in the car, Errol jogging to keep up. 

“Well, shit,” Raylan muttered.

“What?”

“Shouldn’t’ve left the windows open.” Raylan threw the car in reverse, backing out onto the gravel road. “Now the whole thing smells like smoke.”

Errol took him another ten minutes into Nobles, past the church and the storefronts clustered near the barbeque joint, down on the dirt roads to where the homes were nearly out of shouting distance from each other through the trees. They stopped at a little blue house with a swingset in the yard and a white porch hung with potted ferns. The door stood open behind the screen. 

Errol knocked on the jamb. “Mrs. Alston?” 

“Round back!”

They followed the little step-stone path past the clothes swaying on the line: back to a garden, neat and jeweled against the deep green woods. A woman in dirty jeans and an old Evarts High t-shirt was hauling up weeds, blonde hair slipping loose from her scarf. Raylan had one sick-sweet second to recognize her before she stood and turned and drew in a huge, shaking breath. 

“Oh my God.” She covered her mouth, streaking earth on her cheek. “Oh God, _Raylan._ ”

“Ava,” he said, helpless. “Ava, what are you doing here?”

“What am _I_ doing here?” She tore off her gloves. “I can’t believe you, turning up on my doorstep when you been dead and buried these eighteen years, asking me what am I _doing here?_ This is my home, Raylan Givens! What are _you_ doing here?” 

Her voice was shaking like a windchime, her eyes glassy. She planted her hands on his chest and shoved and he staggered back a step, Errol grabbing at his shoulder. 

“You _asshole_ ,” Ava cried. “You think we ain’t got phones here? You couldn’t write a letter? I loved you from the time I was twelve years old, even after I knew we weren’t going to be together, you know why? You were my friend, Raylan Givens. I kept your secret. What made you think I couldn’t keep this one too?” 

“Ava—” 

He had nothing else to say. When he reached for her she hit him again and he grunted under it, waiting, and finally she clutched his shoulders and breathed hard against his collar for a long minute. He could smell the sunlight on her hair. Then she pushed him away, tears shining on her cheeks, though her face was set. 

“Jesus Christ,” she said. “Come on inside. We ain’t doing this in the garden.”

She set Errol up in the front room with a glass of lime cola and the remote to the little square TV. Raylan leaned against the back door, watched her moving round her own kitchen. Warmth was starting to sting at him through the numb shock, pain like a limb waking up. 

“You look dead on your feet, Raylan, have you slept at all?”

“Slept a few hours on the side of the road, coming down.”

“You ain’t eaten none either, have you, you foolish man.” She was wiping a counter that was already clean, scrubbing each fingernail under the running faucet.

“No appetite,” he said.

“Well, I guess there’s no harm in a little liquid breakfast.” She poured herself a finger of rye and then two for him when he nodded. “No ice, right?”

“No ice.”

“I know it ain’t gone seven thirty in the morning.” She stood for a second with her hand on the bottle, looking out the back window into the garden, the woods. “But I get the feeling ain’t neither one of us gonna turn down the help.”

“No ma’am.”

They sat at the table. There was a clutch of fresh flowers in the vase—speedwell, pansies, a single pink calla—and behind it, a framed photo hung on the green wallpaper. 

Ava caught him looking at it. “You been gone a long time, Raylan.”

He settled his hat on the table. “So I see. Thought you were going with Bowman.”

“Bowman didn’t lay a hand on me the first couple years we were married, but he sure made up for it after,” she said. Her voice laid out the words smooth and steady as a hand on a steering wheel, taking them down a road she could follow in her sleep. “Beat one baby out of me. I didn’t give him the chance to do it again. When I had to leave him, I went to Boyd, and when I had to leave Boyd, I came here.”

Raylan unclenched his fist from his hat before he ruined it. “Did—”

“No.” She covered his hand. “No, Raylan. Boyd never—that ain’t why I left.” 

After a moment he nodded. Ava blew out a full breath and took down her hair and twisted the scarf tight in one hand. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tell it to you like that. I’m all turned around, Raylan.”

“Don’t be sorry,” he said quietly. 

“When I had to get myself out of Harlan I came here.” She drained her whiskey and stood, refilling the glass with RC and leaning against the counter. “Ellstin put me to work in the barbeque till I had enough money to pay him for a car. I was thinking California? You know, beaches, them fancy cities, people always looking for another pretty face. You remember how I used to be real pretty, Raylan. But by then I’d met Isaiah, and Isaiah said either he was coming with me or I was staying here. And I thought, if I was gonna have to make something for myself, might as well do it somewhere we’d be safe. And you know there ain’t no safer place than Nobles for black folk, or for women like me.”

Raylan took a long drink, sucking the rye off his teeth and licking his stinging lips. Ava set the whiskey bottle on the table and lifted a hand to the picture on the wall, hovering above the glass as she traced each face. 

“Isaiah, my husband. This is Winnie Vi, she’s twelve, and JR’s nine.”

Raylan regarded their Sunday clothes and smiles, the gap of the boy’s missing front tooth. “Ava, they’re beautiful.”

“Sometimes I look at them and all I can think is, _now I know._ ” She smiled. Her face still with that kiss of dirt, wry and resolute and beautiful. “You’ll like them. Winnie’s smart as a whip. Always got her nose in a book. JR’s quiet but lord, is he funny. He’s got this smile you wouldn’t believe.”

“Isaiah Junior?”

“No, JR for his initials. Josiah Raylan,” Ava said. “Josiah for his daddy’s daddy.” 

He’d had the liquor halfway to his mouth but he stilled, struck, before he put it back down. 

“Ava,” he said. “Why would you curse that child?”

“Your name’s a curse, is that it?” 

“How ain’t it?”

“You know, I talked about wanting to name a baby for you, when I was with Boyd. He wouldn’t hear of it either.” She swirled the soda in her glass, looking at him. “As if his grief was the only one we were living with. You remember teaching me to shoot pool? To throw a punch? You remember how I came to you crying when Hyatt Liscombe broke my heart junior year, and I saw how things were with you and Boyd, and you trusted me the way you did? Or way before that, when my daddy died, and you sat on the church steps and told me how not to be afraid of the dark? Raylan, you were dead. And I was mad as hell to think your name would end in sorrow.”

She sat straight-backed in the chair, one arm stretched out under the flowers, and he could see she’d come to the end of all the waiting she was going to give him. She’d been like that when they were young, too: patient as iron. Wordless, he drained his whiskey and thunked the glass back on the table.

“Small wonder you don’t remember none of that,” she said. “You been gone a long time.” 

“Don’t you put that on me.” He worked his jaw. “Yeah, I stayed gone.”

“Why?”

“You know why.”

“I reckon I do, Raylan. But I’m asking you to tell me.”

“Ava—”

“I watched them bury a box I thought had your ashes in it,” Ava said. “Tell me why, Raylan Givens.” 

He rubbed his mouth. “You know about the fire.”

“They said it was an accident. They said the generator blew and that’s why it was so bad there wasn’t no body. But I know better. I know it’s because Bo sent Arlo and Bowman to—to run you off of Boyd.”

“Arlo didn’t quite mean to start it. The fire. Something just happened to catch on the stove when he was slamming us around. So in that way I suppose it was an accident,” Raylan said. “But he did mean the lighter fluid.”

“Lighter fluid?” Ava’s voice was snake-soft, her face white with rage. “I hope he’s rotting in hell. That bastard. I wish I’d sent him there myself.” 

That made Raylan smile, the smile he always got thinking about Arlo being dead. It tugged odd at his face, like his skin was made of rubber gone stiff and cracking with age.

“That’s the last thing I remember. The smell of it, the feel of it hitting my clothes.” 

Raylan twisted his ring. They were getting closer to the part that didn’t bear thinking on. But Ava’s gaze was still fishhooked in him, pulling—through what, he didn’t know. Everything from that time was a dim snarled mess in his head, boxed up and buried deep. 

“Boyd don’t remember much neither,” Ava said. Coaxing, like you would for an animal, some creature without language. “He remembers Arlo kicking the door down. Then he woke up in Bowman’s truck halfway back to Bo’s. Bowman was panicking. He was barely eighteen then, he thought he’d just been an accessory to murder. By the time Boyd made it back to the trailer, Arlo was long gone, and Boyd thought there was nothing to be done for you but watch you burn.” 

Without quite meaning to, Raylan closed his eyes, covering them with his hand when the pink light seeping through was still too much. He’d never seen that fire from the outside, but it hung there in the black of his eyelids just the same. 

“Arlo didn’t save you,” Ava said.

He took his hand down, tracing the patterned tablecloth, blinking. 

“Helen,” he said. 

“How?”

“My mama sent her after Arlo. She pulled me out. Brought me here. But they were afraid Bo would still be after me. They thought he _had_ sent Arlo to kill us. They knew Bo couldn’t let it stand, us defying him like that—he couldn’t. He wouldn’t stop until I was dead. So I had to be dead,” Raylan said. 

Ava closed her eyes for a long moment. “Jesus Christ, Raylan.”

“It took a fair while for me to wake up, after.” He rubbed his temple, the barely-there bump of bone beneath the hair that was starting to grey. “So I guess they had plenty of time to get everything laid out. It was my mama who did it. You remember how good she was at that, soft-talking men back into line. She told Bo that any payment he was owed he’d already taken, me being dead and all. It was over. And nobody better go after anybody else, or Limehouse would put a stop to it.” He shrugged. “I think they were friends, after a fashion, my mama and Limehouse. At any rate they understood each other.” 

“And there ain’t no way Ellstin Limehouse was gonna let anybody in Harlan get away with trying a lynching twice.”

He frowned. “It wasn’t—that ain’t what it was.”

“What would you call it?”

“Bo sent them, that was just business, it wasn’t about—what we were or anything, it was him hating that Boyd wasn’t under his thumb, hating looking weak like that. We almost expected that. The rest was just—Arlo being Arlo. Hell, you want to be angry—” he found his shoulders tightening, taking up the tension that didn’t come out in his voice— “be angry at my mama. My aunt Helen. They’re the ones who looked me in the eye and lied, when I was lying beat to shit holed up in the back room of some old lady’s house in Nobles. They’re the ones told me my man was dead and I, I couldn’t even mourn him at all. That I had to leave and never come back.” 

Ava looked away. The fury had gone diffuse and brittle in her: ashen, a fire she was out of practice keeping stoked but didn’t know how to let die all the way. Weren’t none of them particularly good at that part, he figured.

“Raylan, I’m so sorry,” she said quietly. 

He bit his tongue before he said something he couldn’t take back. He’d had to loosen his grip on the heavy thing in his throat in order to tell her what she wanted: it was all still there, scrabbling for more. Lord only knew what; he wasn’t thinking on any one thing, just recognizing the taste of everything he’d buried as it kept crawling up his throat, hunting for words. Ava had married Bowman, who was guilty. She’d been with Boyd. She’d gotten out, built herself a safe, sunny life. He worked the ring on his finger: around, around, around. 

Ava took the empty glasses and washed them in the sink, setting them upside down in the rack to dry. It was to get a couple moments free from looking at him like this, he knew. 

The hush welled up between them: a smack of laughing applause from the tv in the front room, the curtains rustling over the open window. He rubbed the toe of his boot over a corner peeling up in the linoleum and waited to be calm again, thinking nothing much at all, in a way that only worked to turn his mind to the sound of waves breathing on Miami Beach as he waited to get shot; to the jungle’s heavy wet quiet, the fuse hissing down.

At last Ava turned back to him and he was sitting in her kitchen again. 

“Being with Bowman, I figured I knew everything there was about being afraid,” she said, low and careful. “Then I came here. Became a mother. Thinking of someone doing to my babies what your daddy did to you, to Boyd—” she took a long breath. “I ain’t never gonna find the line I won’t cross to keep my children safe. That’s what Frances and Helen did, Raylan. It ain’t right. You can be mad about it, honey. But until you have a child, you ain’t gonna understand the kind of fear that made them do it.”

He was done with all this. “Where’s Boyd, Ava?”

For the first time, he couldn’t quite read the look she gave him. Then she moved to the stairs. 

“Come with me.”

“Ava. Just tell me where he is.”

“I have something to give you first.”

She took him to her bedroom. He raised an eyebrow at her, and she smiled a little before she went to a little vanity at the window, overlooking the clothesline. More family pictures stood there: some very old, black and white with their luminous solemn faces. She pulled a small jewelry box from the back of a bottom drawer. 

“He only gave it to me for safekeeping,” she said, and held out the box in her palm. 

Raylan took it and opened it. The ring sat inside like the box had been made for it. After a long unsteady moment, head rushing a bit like he’d stood too quickly, he shut the box and put it in his pocket and looked at her.

“I know who it is you loved, Raylan,” Ava said. “You know I loved him too, before you—left, and for a long while after. But I’m telling you, honey, I don’t know if that man’s there anymore.”

She stepped close and put a hand on his cheek, smoothed her thumb under his eye. Let go.

“Ava, please,” Raylan said. “Tell me where he is.” 

Raylan pulled off the dirt road in front of a few haphazard trailers, angled away from each other like barn cats. He’d forgotten how green Harlan could be: the green that grew so dense it nearly hummed. The oaks and hemlocks stood out against the greying sky. Beneath them crouched the old church, honeysuckle and Virginia creeper growing thick over its foundation, over its clapboard walls and the stairs to its dark empty doorway, where Boyd Crowder sat with a cigarette in his broad miner’s hand. 

Raylan stepped out of the car and walked up the hill. Boyd breathed out one last cloud of smoke and stubbed out the butt. He made no move to rise, his eyes sealed on Raylan, his elbows on his knees.

Raylan jerked his head. “Anyone else here?” 

“No,” Boyd said, just loud enough to be heard. He pressed his gaze all over Raylan like a hot iron before he met his eyes. “Ava called, told me you were coming. I sent the boys to Bowman’s. Didn’t figure we’d care for an audience.”

Raylan worked his jaw. “Hope you don’t mind I don’t take you at your word.”

Boyd spread his arms in wordless invitation, turning his head to keep looking as Raylan stepped past him through the open door. Inside, the light that made it through the vines got caught on the dust hanging in the air: almost peaceful, if it weren’t for everything else. Raylan looked around and saw about what he expected.

Boyd’s eyes followed him as he came back out and walked down the steps and stood there for a second with his hand still resting on his holster, looking down the hill. There was no one around. It felt like they’d come into some invisible joint of the world, a hidden pocket between the deep turning gears. He thought he could hear the two of them breathing. 

Boyd said, “Well, Raylan, are you satisfied?”

Raylan turned and took one step and punched Boyd hard on the jaw, snapping his head to one side. Boyd was smiling when he looked up: blood on his teeth, the kind of savage despairing grin you gave someone with a gun to your head. 

“Did you know?” Raylan rasped. 

“No.” Boyd wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spat into the ivy. “Not till a couple days ago, when they said your name on the TV on account of that gun thug you shot.”

“A couple days,” Raylan repeated. He felt sick. Eighteen years of being faithful to his memory, and then Raylan slept with another man more or less the same day Boyd learned he was alive. 

“I knew you’d be coming back for me,” Boyd said softly. “You’re looking good, Raylan. Looking like a lawman.” 

_“Fuck_ you, Boyd.”

“It’s all right.” Boyd eased to his feet, stepped down to stand level with Raylan. “I ain’t making you choose again. Once was too many. I’ll turn myself in, give you everything you need. I’ll go down for it. Are you prepared for that?”

“Am I prepared to _arrest you_ ?” Raylan laughed. Boyd was so near Raylan could smell him, feel him in the air: a thousand things he’d buried. “Boyd, you were _dead_. And then last night my boss puts your goddamn file in front of me, full of all the shit you been doing while I was mourning you—”

Boyd shook his head. “The past ain’t the question presently at hand, Raylan, I’m talking about what are we going to do now?”

“The past is the only thing in question here, Boyd! I stayed in Harlan for you. I let you put your ring on my finger. You _promised_ me, you swore you weren’t ever going to be like them. _Years_ of working so hard to be better than them, and for what? This?” Raylan flung his arm at the sagging church, its belly full of fascist bullshit.

“Well, being better than our daddies didn’t save us from our daddies, now did it,” said Boyd flatly. 

“So you figured being a Nazi was your next best bet.”

“You _know_ I don’t mean that shit, I’m just—”

“Oh, I know what you’re just, and it ain’t better.” 

Boyd was reaching for him, trying to soothe, explain, sway in that way he had; Raylan smacked his arm away, trying to fracture some of his false damn calm.

“What did you expect me to do?” 

“Anything. Anything would’ve been better than this. What, did they close all the mines? Stop needing houses built? Shut all the schools?”

“I told you I wouldn’t go back down the hole without you.” 

“Oh, so that promise was worth keeping. But the rest of it was nothing to you.”

“Nothing? It’s in every goddamn thing I’ve done, you asshole!” Boyd snapped his mouth shut on the edge of his words and took a few grating breaths. He rubbed both his hands over his face, which gave Raylan an excellent view of the knuckle tattoos. 

Raylan wanted to ask him about his new teeth. Raylan wanted to kiss the bruise purpling his mouth. Raylan wanted to lay into him until he was unrecognizable: until he hit back, until they were both no more than bare little stones breaking each other apart into the dirt. 

“I’ll tell you all of it, Raylan,” Boyd said, “but first I got to know. If I confess, and go to prison, I need you to be prepared for that.” 

“It’s been eighteen goddamn years,” Raylan said, low and vicious. “You ain’t going nowhere. I ain’t even close to done with you.”

“I know, sweetheart. I know. They carved the year on your headstone and everything, you know that? I come by and visit you every now and then. Helen don’t have much to say to me anymore, but she lets me talk to you.” Boyd gave another small, brutal smile. “Though I can’t say up until now you’ve done a whole lot of talking back.”

“Boyd, I’m going to kill them.” 

“Who, Raylan? We ain’t killing your aunt. Our daddies are dead. What, you gonna set fire to the whole damn county? No. We’ll get our own back another way. I ain’t losing you again.” 

Something on Raylan’s face must have given him away, or maybe Boyd figured out on his own: his face twisted. 

“She knew the whole time, didn’t she. Helen,” he said softly. “God damn it.” 

“Eighteen goddamn years,” Raylan repeated: an inside-out prayer.

Boyd took another breath and then his face changed again. Raylan felt dizzy. Even after all this time, Boyd was the only one he knew who worked like this, his mind alighting from one thought to another like some bright-eyed bird in a tree so vast it touched night and day at the same time. He stepped close again. Raylan didn’t stop him. 

“How you been, boy, you been good?”

“Sometimes. Not really.” 

“No, I guess not. I know it’s been real heavy, honey. Didn’t have no one on my side but Ava, and then I didn’t have no one at all.”

“She hates all this as much as I do. She must. Why’d she tell you I was coming?”

Boyd shrugged. Something turned over in his expression. 

“I helped her get out,” he said finally. “Suppose she wanted to return the favor.” 

Raylan huffed half a laugh and pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes so hard colors flared up in the dark of his eyelids. 

When he took his hand away, Boyd was staring at him, his face pale with the look he’d been too hard to show before, the look all the others had been hiding: cracked and leaking like an eggshell, heartbreak and misery and brittle, desperate gratitude. He reached out gently and took up Raylan’s hand: the right one, with the ring.

“Oh, Raylan,” he whispered. 

“Married a woman once,” Raylan said. “Didn’t take.”

“Can’t imagine why.” 

“I loved her.” 

“Of course you did. But you didn’t tell her who you are.” Boyd was stroking his thumb over the tiny horseshoe, looking down to spare them each other’s faces. “I hate that you been all alone with this.”

“What are we doing here, Boyd? I’m gonna arrest you and then, what, visit you in prison?”

“Who said anything about arresting? I’m turning myself in of my own volition, perhaps moved by a genuine God-given spirit of remorse for the harm I have caused.”

“Boyd.”

“What if I asked you to come away with me, Raylan?” Boyd raised his chin, hard and intent, eyes glittering. “What if we left, right now, went out west like we were going to? I got money. Enough to keep us safe, set us up in a new life, everything we dreamed when we were twenty years old. We could make it, Raylan, I know we could.”

The prospect opened up in him like a sinkhole, a waft of cool air from some cavern just beyond. It was so sweet he’d never gone near the thought of it. He couldn’t answer. He couldn’t even move. 

“See, that’s why,” Boyd told him. The electricity dissipated as quick as it came; now he was just weary. “It’s like before, Raylan, we only got so many options. We stay or we go. And this time it’s who you can’t go. So I’ll stay.” He let Raylan’s hand fall, spreading his own at his sides. Surrendering. “I told you, I ain’t making you choose again. Ain’t no going back. Ain’t no running from this. I’d rather spend the rest of my life in prison than watch you tear yourself apart trying to be something you’re not for my sake. Never again,” he said: voice thick, coal-dark. “You hear me, boy? Never again.” 

Raylan fisted his hands in Boyd’s shirt and shoved. They went staggering back against the stair railing, which creaked like it might give at any moment. He was breathing hard, some ballast in him lurching out of true; he searched Boyd’s calm, naked face, the Harlan-dense green of his eyes. Three days ago everything in Raylan’s world had been certain. Now nothing was, not even this, what used to be the only true thing.

Boyd leaned in. Of course: he’d started it the first time, too. 

Slowly he cupped Raylan’s face in his hands and kissed him: a sweet, steady pressure, smooth and devouring. He tasted like cigarettes. Dion had too. Raylan made a small noise in the back of his throat and Boyd sucked in a hot breath and knocked the hat from his head and lit into him, laying his whole body into him, walking him back inexorably across the step to press him against the opposite rail. 

Raylan kissed back. He couldn’t unclench the fists in Boyd’s shirt. Boyd’s hands were everywhere, grinding heat into Raylan’s skin, manic, scouring. The fucking liar: he’d been acting _calm._ He was no further from the edge than Raylan. He might have been closer. 

Boyd unhooked the holster and badge, dumped them unceremoniously to the ground, snapped open Raylan’s belt. Raylan yanked at Boyd’s shirt and scraped teeth against his jaw.

“We ain’t fucking in your Nazi church.” 

Boyd laughed, sharp and wild. “Backseat of your cop car it is.”

“No.” 

Raylan kicked Boyd’s feet out from under him, pushing, and they went stumbling past the church, Boyd scrambling backwards, still grabbing at every inch of Raylan he could, until they came up hard against the massive old hemlock shading the slope. Boyd grunted. Raylan kissed him. He wasn’t interested in talking anymore. That thick bitter thing he’d been swallowing down all day—for days, he thought, for nearly twenty years—it had come fully loose in him at last; he was shaking with it, ready for blood, burning up. 

Boyd could tell. He was stroking Raylan’s hip, the fine hairs at his nape, trying to hold him together. 

“Hey, now,” he murmured, palming Raylan’s cheek, trying to catch his gaze. Raylan jerked away. 

“Don’t.” 

Boyd huffed. “What you got to hide from me, son?” He kept caressing as he spoke, long heavy strokes like he was trying to draw it all into himself. “I know this pain. I know this joy. I know how it burns. I’m the only one in the world who does. I’m your man, Raylan. Come on, now.”

“Don’t you be _sweet_ to me.”

“How you gonna stop me?”

It would’ve been easy to do it his way. It was always easy with Boyd: smooth and warm and honey-slick, even at the beginning: before the rings, before the house, back when they were too young to be as afraid as they should’ve been. Raylan couldn’t stand the thought of having that again. Not now. Not like this. Both of them gone hard inside, both killers: it would be worse than the worst crime to grab onto the tender, hard-fought thing those boys had made like it was just another thing to use, to—wrench it up from its resting place, throw it down between them now to be scarred and torn—

Raylan shoved Boyd back against the tree and dropped to his knees. 

It had been a long time. He hadn’t, with Dion. 

He did everything he could remember to push Boyd over the edge rough and fast and careless. At least Boyd had shut up: hands tight in Raylan’s hair, breathing hard, giving it right back. It didn’t take long but it felt longer. Raylan’s pulse thumping in his ears, his mind half outside himself. The taste, the way he had to breathe: like the warblers, something he’d forgotten he knew. 

After he finished Boyd slid panting to his knees and nudged his forehead against Raylan’s. Raylan leaned back to get away from him, kept leaning until he was sprawled flat on his back in the grass, chest heaving, staring up at the flat white sky. But of course Boyd followed him down. 

“Okay, baby.” He was brushing soft kisses over the mess of Raylan’s mouth. “That’s just fine. But this part we do my way.” 

He guided Raylan’s hands, kept their fingers twined as they started to work, Boyd talking all the while. Raylan felt like he was being set loose and pinned down at the same time: each word cutting him a little further from his skin, each touch weighing him into the ground like a stone. His mind kept straying. The calluses rasping on his skin were Dion’s, and he was reaching back, letting the fear get stripped from him like a rind; that was Winona’s soft hair on his collarbone as she looked and didn’t look at him, the sweet sting of loss standing out like static on his skin, the first thing that hadn’t had to die to be taken from him. These were Boyd’s hands. Boyd at sixteen, daring, at the creek, in the truck, on the mountain, quick and giddy. Boyd at twenty-one in the bed in the home they’d made, a slow warm morning. Boyd in the sunlight. Boyd in the dark. 

Boyd in the dark, running, desperate, holding onto him so hard he’d thought no one would be able to pry him away, even to bury them. Boyd hauling him out of the ground back up into the light. 

He came like that: Boyd’s hands on his, his face in Boyd’s neck, Boyd’s voice honey-brown in his ear. _It’s okay, Raylan. It’s me. I’m right here._

They put themselves back together without speaking. 

Boyd’s shirt was ruined. Raylan had wrenched it nearly to pieces, and they’d used it to clean up. Boyd ducked into a trailer and came out in a new one, white with an eagle screaming over an American flag, and a denim jacket.

Raylan could see it on his face: he’d done it to be funny, the barbed baiting humor he used on outsiders. He was asking Raylan to laugh at it like he used to. 

Raylan turned away to find his gun and badge, brush the dirt from his hat. He wasn’t trying to be cruel, not anymore. There was just nothing left. He was so empty every breath seemed to ring in him like a bell. 

They left the church door standing open on the shadows and pulled away in silence. 

Boyd was looking at him. Raylan flicked on the radio. Boyd closed his eyes for a long moment. Then he turned and leaned his head against the window, watched the green blur of Harlan roll away behind him, the radio’s low vibrant chatter filling the car. Despite everything, it still fucking smelled like smoke.


	2. Chapter 2

They drove without speaking for a long time. 

Numbness rose and fell in Raylan. He didn’t open his mouth mostly because he couldn’t tell what would come out of it, in a way that made him think of Arlo. 

He pulled over at a gas station outside London, left Boyd at the pump, and went inside to pay and grab some food. Time had come loose around him like a rotten tooth. He’d forgotten he needed to eat. 

When he stepped back outside the town car was gone, and he felt a swooping hot dread that was almost relief until Boyd whistled at him: he’d pulled the car over to a picnic table on the other side of the parking lot, near the chain link fence guarding the Baptist church next door. 

Raylan stalked over. Boyd jangled the keys at him and Raylan snatched them back.

“Don’t give me that look,” Boyd said calmly. “You’re the one who left them in the ignition. Think I’d run?”

Raylan jerked his head at the car. “Shut up and get in.”

Boyd perched on top of the table and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Now, don’t you know it ain’t safe to eat and drive at the same time, Mister Lawman?” he drawled. “You so hellbent on going back to sitting in silence you’d risk _both_ our lives? Best you set down, take a few minutes.”

Raylan had a vivid mental image of picking Boyd up by his collar and belt and tossing him into the car like an unusually loud-mouthed hay bale. Instead, he sat down and unwrapped an ice cream bar. 

Boyd watched, amused. 

“Not one word,” Raylan said. 

“My lips are sealed.” 

“Evidently not.”

He finished the ice cream and started the sandwich. Boyd swiveled to face him, his knee bumping Raylan’s shoulder. Raylan shrugged him off. Boyd swayed away a little, nudged up against him again. Raylan gave up squabbling in favor of eating as fast as he could, hunger opening up in him the more he acknowledged it. The air was sweet from the honeysuckle tangled in the fence behind them. A few bees drifted curiously around his hands. 

Boyd kept looking at him. Raylan took a bite. 

“Something on my face?” 

“Yeah, that ugly thing.” He mimicked Raylan’s frown.

“Knock it off.”

“What are you gonna do, _arrest_ me?” Boyd smiled. “You’re wearing your hair longer. It suits you.” 

“Wish I could say the same of you.” 

“What, you don’t like it?”

“Looks like you sucked off a firecracker.”

“ _There_ he is. Raylan Givens, ladies and gentlemen!” Boyd barked a laugh. “Man, talk about blood from a stone. This is worse than when we started up. You remember we worked old Paul Liscombe’s field for two damn weeks before you so much as said my name?”

“Took you that long to stop running your mouth enough for me to get a word in edgewise.”

“Come on now, Raylan. Much like hauling in the man you love to face justice for his many crimes, cutting tobacco is a thankless task done in silence. I was only trying to keep up the mood.”

“You were trying to get on my nerves so bad I wouldn’t notice you sneaking back around to plant dope in the sections we’d already cleared.”

“That was some good weed,” Boyd said complacently. “Man, we smoked that shit like chimneys, you remember that? If there’s a corner of Harlan County we didn’t fill with that smoke I have yet to find it.”

“No, it was shitty weed, because you didn’t have the first clue what to do about growing or harvesting or drying it.” Raylan cracked open the soda. “Now, the weed you got off the Bennetts with the money you made from selling your shit to them Clover Hill kids didn’t know good bud from patchouli? _That_ was the good stuff.” 

“That was a good summer.” Boyd’s was voice loose and distant, curling through his words like the warm surface of a river current. “Driving up into the hills. Drinking beer, getting high, going swimming. Making time. You remember?” 

Boyd’s leg a sun-hot column all down Raylan’s side. Raylan couldn’t say yes: he’d spent so long not remembering he didn’t know now if he could. But he couldn’t say no, either.

“I fell in love with you that summer, Raylan.”

“Boyd.”

“What? Is it gonna be less true if I don’t say it?” 

Raylan crumpled up the empty wrappers in one fist without answering.

Boyd sighed. “There were some times I never could fathom how your mind works, baby, but I ain’t sure how even you could twist things around enough to be afraid of what you already know.” 

“I was always afraid of this. Don’t tell me you forgot.” 

Boyd rubbed his forehead. “No.”

“And I wasn’t wrong to be.” 

Neither of them could argue that, not anymore. “No,” said Boyd, quiet. 

Not understanding why, only knowing it was true, Raylan said, “We ain’t sixteen no more, Boyd.”

“No, we are not.” Boyd looked back at him. “We’re old, old men now, Raylan. And since there’s nothing left to be afraid of anymore, I guess we got to be afraid of each other, is that right?”

Raylan took a breath. He never should have let Boyd start talking; he knew better—had known better for a long, long time. Now everything was even harder than it had to be.

“Boyd,” said Raylan, “what did you do?” 

“I did say I’d tell you all of it, didn’t I.” Boyd turned his face up to the sky, closed his eyes. Opened them: his pupils shrinking in the hard grey light. “Well, first I killed Arlo.”

Raylan stiffened. “Arlo died driving drunk.”

“He did indeed. I just helped him along. One night he got kicked out of the VFW, got in his truck hammered. I’d been waiting for it.” Boyd’s voice was steady, like he was waiting still. “I ran him off the road. Made sure he saw it was me watching him till he stopped breathing.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“It can’t be tied to me. No one ever even knew it wasn’t an accident. But I thought you should know.” 

Raylan rubbed his mouth. It didn’t come as a surprise. He could almost see it: black road, engine steam, their faces blazing in the headlights— “Did he say anything? I mean, was he—”

“No, sweetheart,” Boyd said. “He wasn’t.”

At the edge of Raylan’s vision, a truck rumbling past on the service road. For so long he’d nursed that hard little twist of satisfaction at Arlo’s death: it had felt like the single halfway decent thing the man had ever done, bringing it on himself in a way that didn’t take anyone else with him. Now that was another lie. 

“You killed Bo, too, didn’t you.”

“Eventually.” Boyd was watching the thicket of vines on the fence like it was a movie screen. “After Arlo, I just—kept driving. I hadn’t planned that far. Didn’t have no clothes, no money, no tools. Everything had burned up with you. I picked up jobs here and there. I spent a lot of time in the desert. I think I was just waiting.”

“For what?”

“I don’t quite know, Raylan. Maybe to die, find you again.” He shrugged. “Maybe for the hate to get so big in me it didn’t have to be a choice anymore.”

Meanwhile Raylan had been going to college and sleeping with coeds, pretending he could be rid of it all easy as draining a bathtub. “I’m sorry.”

“What are you sorry for? You even know?” One side of Boyd’s mouth slid up, a sickle smile. “You were wrong, saying I forgot my vows. I didn’t forget a one. You think I was blind to the kind of killing in my blood? How easy it would be to get eaten up by it? I joined the fucking army because of you, asshole, you know that?” 

“It was in your file.”

Boyd snorted. “Didn’t do me much good. I spent fourteen months in a different desert only to learn your high fucking ideals didn’t mean shit there either. When they kicked me out, the only thing that changed was I’d gotten real good at killing after all.”

“Desert never struck me as the kind of place healing comes easy,” Raylan said after a moment. “But if those years were anything for you like they were for me, I don’t think there’s a place on earth could’ve done the trick.”

“Only Harlan,” Boyd said. 

Raylan recoiled. “Fuck _Harlan_. You got out. Why on earth would you come back?”

“Like you wouldn’t have done the same? Don’t lie to me, Raylan.”

“I only came back when I had no choice.”

“No. You came back when it was safe. When our daddies were already gone, because I made it so, in your memory.”

“That ain’t how it is. I wouldn’t have—” 

“Don’t you _lie_ to me,” said Boyd savagely. “You think I don’t know you anymore? You _wish_ you’d killed them. It burns you up. Sure, that sweet boy I married wanted to get out, be righteous, live a good life, but he had that anger in him then just like you’ve got it now. Oh, I know about the men you killed. Same kind of men I’ve killed. Same reasons, too, when you get down to it. But just cause you got that tin on your hip, you’re justified and I ain’t? That’s bullshit, Raylan Givens, and I’ll live with it cause I have to. But don’t you dare lie to me about it.”

“I didn’t join the marshals on a whim, Boyd,” Raylan bit out. “I did it to put up as many walls as I could between me and the man who’d walk back into Harlan and kill his daddy in cold blood and be glad of it. I did it to stop myself turning into the man it turns out you couldn’t fucking wait to be!”

“Spare me the righteousness, Raylan. You did it because you’re a coward.”

Raylan jerked his head, breathing hard. “Boyd, I swear to God—”

“Oh, is that too much for you to hear, baby?” Boyd stepped closer, smooth and vicious. “Too bad. Because I did everything you would have and more, and you asked me to tell it to you. I came back to Harlan. I shot my daddy at the dinner table. I hurt people, stole money, blew shit up. Killed six men, counting our daddies, and I watched others killed on my word. I poured poison into this county. I let it come right through me. I don’t even know if I can tell you I’m sorry for it and have that be the truth, because I made myself into someone who could live with it. Everything I had to do to stay alive—every little thing felt like spitting on your grave. It was what I was running from in the desert, what I knew was coming for me. I hated it, Raylan. I hated it so much I started hating you for showing me what it could’ve been like, how good it could’ve been—”

“Boyd.” Raylan’s voice so low he barely felt it. 

“So then I did worse things, and worse, because it was never going to get better,” Boyd said, silky, logical, grin nearly wolfish. “Why would it? Why shouldn’t they reap what they’d sowed? I was good at it. I was hard in a way my daddy never had to be. I was an outlaw the likes of which you ain’t never seen. It is funny, though.” He slid his hands back in his pockets. “Sometimes I used to think, maybe one day I’d do something so terrible you’d come out of that grave and make me stop. And now you have.”

Raylan was clenching his jaw so hard he heard his teeth creak. 

“I already told you I been talking to your grave eighteen years with no answer, Raylan. Don’t you dare give me silence now.”

“I couldn’t help that.”

“So help it now. Tell me. I’ll take anything.”

Raylan dug out the jewelry box and threw it at Boyd, who caught it, fumbling, then paled and jerked forward as if magnetized. 

“Take that, then.”

“Raylan—”

“No, go on, have it. You know me so damn well? Sure, okay. But I know you too, Boyd Crowder. I know you’re a liar. I know there ain’t no conscience in your head, just a nest of strings pulling every which way. I know for every promise you kept me there’s another two you broke.” Raylan stepped up to him. “And I knew you when I married you. When you said you’d wear that ring to your grave, and I believed you. Well, far be it from me to stop you now. Even if it’s a grave you dug yourself. Just know you’re digging mine too, right there beside you.”

Boyd took one step toward the table and then another, almost blindly: his eyes fixed on the box in his hand. He sank onto the bench, flicked open the lid, ran a thumb over the ring.

“I remember the night you asked me,” he said softly. “You weren’t afraid then. You were—shining.” 

“I was stupid.”

Boyd snorted. “You had your fair share, I’ll admit, same as me.” He held the ring out. For lack of a better idea, Raylan turned up his palm so Boyd could drop the damn thing into it. “Tell me how you made it.”

“You already know how.”

“I don’t care. Tell me again.” 

“Well, it wasn’t like I could come by my mama’s house asking for a family wedding band,” Raylan said wryly. 

“You mean, like that horseshoe ring I stole out of my granny’s jewelry box?” Boyd said, grinning.

“Yeah, like that. I didn’t want anything of that history touching you anyway.” Raylan pressed a fingertip over the ring, testing the smooth bone. “There was that six-pointer up on Sukey Ridge. First hunting trip we took, you know, together.”

“I remember.”

“It was my shot, so you said I should keep the rack. Didn’t want to mount it. Didn’t want to throw it away, either, because of what it meant. When we got Dolly I started cutting off the antlers for her to chew on. Making little fishing lures. And then later, I was thinking, _what on earth am I going to put on his finger?_ And then I knew.” He cleared his throat. “What happened to her? Dolly?” 

“I don’t know. I spent all night in that field and never saw her, never saw her since.” 

“Hope she had the sense to run.” 

“Yeah.” 

Raylan handed the ring back. “Finish held up pretty good,” he said. “No wonder, seeing as it ain’t been worn in years.”

“I asked Ava to take it with her when she left me.” Boyd held it on the tip of one finger like a lightning bug about to get away from him. “Knew it’d be safer with her. I asked her to bury me with it, if it came to that. So that’s another promise I intended to keep.”

“You didn’t say anything about her, before. Why?”

“She ain’t just another thing to confess. I loved her, Raylan.” 

“You think I don’t know that? You damn well better have loved her, you gave her that.” 

Boyd tucked the ring back in the box. “I was laying down every night with this hole in me, waking up with this hole in me. She came through me like a light,” he said. “Like a needle of sunlight, so bright I could barely look at her. So bright that for a while I couldn’t see nothing else.”

Raylan understood that despite himself. He’d never been able to take his eyes off Winona either, even when he should’ve. Drawn to her like a moth: Boyd the shadow on the other side of her radiance, like Raylan must have been to Ava, all unknowing. 

He was so tired. He took his hat off and rubbed his forehead, pushing the skin like putty.

“Any other tragedies you want to get off your chest?” It came out less biting than he’d meant it. “Or can we get back on the road?”

“Oh, you know how it is, darling, the deeper you dig the more you find. But I think that’ll do for now, don’t you?” 

Raylan chewed his lip, nodded. He moved to get in the car. Boyd stopped him, gently, one hand on his arm, the other folding the box into his palm. 

“Hold on to it for me,” Boyd said. “Can’t take it with me where I’m going.”

Raylan’s phone rang as they were passing Berea.

“So,” Art said. “I hear you called in the state police for a raid on what sounds like a stop and shop of every hillbilly shitkicker in Harlan, from Bowman Crowder all the way down to some Oklahoma skinhead try-hard. Is that right?”

“Tell them to watch out for Jared. The try-hard. Bowman’ll think he’s the mole,” Boyd said quietly, which answered the question of whether or not he could hear Art through the phone’s tinny connection. 

Raylan frowned at him and told Art, “That’s right.”

“Staties, Raylan?” 

“Got an anonymous tip. Kind of thing it’s best to act quick.” 

“Yeah, well, next time tell me first, damn it,” Art said, testy. “I’m gonna send Rachel and Tim down there. Staties are planning on hitting ’em a little before midnight, but would you believe the address don’t show up on the maps? Why don’t you meet them in town, introduce yourself, give them the lay of the land.” 

“Don’t think I can. I’m running down a lead on Boyd Crowder.”

The man in question stretched languidly in the passenger seat, long haunches flexing. Raylan had gone down on him at the church thinking that would cauterize things, but here they were, knowing full well how they’d betrayed each other, and Raylan only wanted him more. 

“A lead good enough you can’t back up your fellow Marshals on the biggest bust we’ve seen in the last eight months?” Art said. Raylan could almost hear the man’s eyebrows climbing. 

“It’s pretty good.”

“It better be.” 

“Look, I’ll be back at the office in an hour or so. Let me tell you about it then before y’all head down to Harlan.” 

“Dan said you were a goddamn handful. Fine, Raylan, come tell me what you been up to, and then I’ll tell you a couple things about how shit works around here.”

Art hung up unceremoniously. Raylan pocketed the phone, eyes on the road. The silence spooled out a couple minutes before Boyd broke it.

“Those boys looked to me, including my brother and my cousin. I made promises,” he said. “It don’t change anything. But I want you to understand what it is I’m doing for you.”

Art’s skinhead comment had put the bitter taste back in Raylan’s mouth. “You’re a saint.” 

“No. I’ve just spent long enough in hell to know how far I’ll go to stay out of it a little longer.” 

Raylan risked a glance at him. The gray day had been cracked here and there by a dense, dusty sunlight, and it glazed Boyd’s cheek, hung in his eyelashes. 

“Will you tell me something?” Boyd said softly. 

Raylan looked back at the road. “What do you want?” 

“Tell me something sweet.” 

He seemed prepared to wait forever for an answer. 

“Slept with a boy night before last,” Raylan said eventually. “First time since you.” 

Boyd smiled. “He beautiful?” 

“To me. You might’ve lynched him on sight.” 

“Tell me he treated you right, or I might yet.” Boyd shifted to face him, the weight of his attention bright and hard as a headlamp. His grin grew. “Look at that blush! Raylan Givens got ice-cold water running through his veins, less he thinks about a pretty boy.”

Raylan chewed his lip. “He said something. Dion.”

“Yeah?”

“He said, it’s always tough for us anywhere.” 

Boyd heard it too; Raylan had known he would. _Us._

“I’d never thought of it like that, like anyone else could understand. It was always just you and me, and then it was just me. I was looking out at the water when he said it, this cloud of lights out in the black, and I felt—” Raylan flexed his hands. “Nobody ever gave me that, before him. I’d never said anything to anyone who could’ve.”

Boyd reached out, smoothed a hand on Raylan’s knee. 

“I’m glad, Raylan.”

Raylan took a breath. “He said something else. Dion.”

“What?”

“He asked me what it was like to kill the people who hurt me. And I couldn’t tell him.” Raylan swallowed. “You were right; I wanted to kill them. I could have. But I didn’t.”

Boyd watched him carefully. “You asking me to tell you how it felt to kill our daddies, Raylan?”

Raylan lifted his chin the barest inch.

“Then let me hear you say it.”

Raylan touched Boyd’s hand on his thigh. “I’m sorry you had to do it on your own back then.” His right hand on Boyd’s left, where Boyd had worn his ring: on the middle finger, so every time he flipped him off Raylan could be reminded what he’d signed up for. “But you don’t have to anymore.”

Boyd was quiet for a while. He cracked the window, wind rushing in. Raylan cracked his too, to stop the air throbbing. 

“It’s one thing to stand on the surface and say the mine’s the way I ain’t going to be my daddy’s man, the way I’m going to live up to you or die trying,” Boyd said at last. “But from the first moment I went down that doghole…” Inside the noise of the wind, his voice felt close, transparent. “You remember. Black as the whale’s belly and twice as hot. Hunched over and scrambling everywhere, like—like an insect picking the bones of some animal ain’t yet dead. I wasn’t like you; I didn’t hate it enough. Part of me _wanted_ it, just to feel that terror down in me, feel my soul pushing back at it like whetting a knife. And then the first time I lit a fuse—it was like nothing could touch me. Not hell, sure as shit not heaven. Like the world weren’t nothing at all, like it was just me and that flame. 

_“That’s_ what it felt like to kill our fathers, Raylan,” Boyd said. “Just that desperate sweet.” 

Raylan laced their fingers. Boyd let him. 

“And then you realize it don’t matter,” Boyd said. “Because you ain’t saved nobody, and you’re still trapped in the same fucking hole you’re going to crawl back down the next day, and the next, and the next.” He looked out at the hills, propping his chin on his thumb. “I wish your boy luck getting off on _that_ story.”

“Not nobody,” Raylan said. 

“What?” 

“You said _nobody_. Ain’t the case. You saved me.” 

“And now you’re returning the favor, huh?” Boyd smiled. “I ain’t in this to be saved, baby. I just want you, I don’t care how. Show me another way and I’ll take it.”

“I tried,” Raylan said.

“Yeah,” Boyd said wearily. “I guess you did.” 

Raylan chewed his lip. 

“What?” Boyd said.

“I thought you said we were done with this for now.”

“You’re the one brought it back up. All I asked for was something sweet, baby. You’re the one turned it round like this.”

“I don’t have anything sweet that this don’t touch. Not a single thing, Boyd.”

“And whose fault is that? Because it ain’t mine.” 

Absurdly, that was what made Raylan’s eyes sting. He blinked hard, breathing through his nose. 

“I wish we’d died,” he said at last. “This is worse.”

Boyd’s hand clenched hard on Raylan’s. “Don’t say that. Don’t you _ever_ say that, Raylan Givens. I’ll go to hell a thousand times before I let you come to harm.” 

“Yeah, well, Boyd, that would be the problem.”

Boyd turned to the window, breathing hard. Then he turned back. “You going to shoot me?” 

“What?” 

“You wish we’d died; well, we didn’t, and we got to live with that. So what, are you going to shoot me to get out of feeling like this? That’s the only way to do it. Because I don’t intend on dying by nobody’s hand but yours, and I don’t intend on you ever dying at all. I won’t watch you be buried again, Raylan. I won’t.”

Raylan clenched his jaw on a noise he didn’t want either of them to hear. It slipped out anyway. Boyd seemed to take that for an answer. 

Another twenty miles of quiet. Slowly, half-accidentally, tension kept easing out of them, like sand spilling out of a glass where their hands were joined. 

Boyd swept a thumb over Raylan’s knuckles. Then he laughed. 

“What?” Raylan wasn’t feeling much by way of humor. 

“I’m just thinking. We used to talk about—you know, books. Baseball. Who was going to pick up booze. Now we got all these dead years to hack our way through before we see any kind of daylight.” He leaned his head back. “You reckon we’ll manage it by the time I get out of jail?” 

Raylan’s mouth twitched, despite everything. “You never know,” he said. “Stranger things have happened.”

The Marshal’s office was humming when they walked in, Art at the whiteboard talking to a short black woman and a slender blond Raylan presumed to be Rachel and Tim. 

Raylan left Boyd at an empty desk and knocked on the glass door of the conference room. Art glanced up at him and frowned, waving him in. Then he looked past him and raised his eyebrows so high they would’ve disappeared in his hair if he’d had any. 

“A pretty good lead, huh,” Art said. “Did you just arrest Boyd Crowder?” 

“No.” Raylan ignored the measuring looks from the coworkers he hadn’t even met yet and maybe never would, if he got fired in the next ten minutes. “He’s turning himself in of his own accord.”

“Is that so.”

“He’s prepared to make a deal. Give up his own people, everything he knows about Frankfort, Detroit, Miami, all of it.”

Art’s weren’t the only eyebrows raised now. 

“In exchange for?” said Rachel.

“He has some conditions,” he told her wryly. He jerked his head at Art. “Can I talk to you a minute?”

Art regarded him. “Sure.” 

Raylan followed him through the side door into his office, and shut it behind him. Art crossed his arms, pokerfaced. Raylan couldn’t help the quick glance to where Boyd was leaning just outside, by all appearances perfectly at ease in that stupid fucking shirt, and when he turned back, Art had a narrow look that made Raylan’s gut clench. He remembered, too late, that he was still wearing yesterday's clothes. 

“All right, let’s talk,” Art said lightly. “You just brought in the most dangerous man in Kentucky on your first damn day, so why do you look like someone shot your dog?”

Raylan ran his tongue over his teeth. He’d spent the night and day making this bed, but it still felt like shit to lie in it. He propped his hands on his hips and said, “I have to recuse myself from the Crowder case.” 

Art’s expression didn’t change. “And why’s that?” 

“I lied to you. Yesterday. When I said I wasn’t friends with him.” 

“So what are you?” 

Raylan looked down. He took off his hat, traced the brim. 

“Raylan, I like to think of myself as a patient man, but you’re starting to test me, here. Just spit it out.”

“I don’t know how,” Raylan said, worn down into honesty. “I’ve never told anyone this. Not once.” 

Art waved a hand. “Just...talk.”

Raylan rubbed his temple. It was feeling that bump of bone, thinking of how much he wished he was back in Ava’s kitchen, that made him tap his head and say, “I ever tell you how I got this scar?” 

“No, Raylan. I can’t say as you have.” 

“My daddy was…mean.” His heart was pounding, but his voice came out just as steady as it had when he’d lied. “He beat my mama and he beat me. Didn’t ever need a reason. Sometimes I’d give him one anyway, just because.” Raylan met Art’s eyes. “I stayed away from him when I was working in the mines to save up the money to get away; I lived in a trailer way out in the holler. It was still Harlan, so I knew it wasn’t never gonna be safe, but I thought it was safer. Well, one night Arlo comes by with a tagalong shitkicker and a baseball bat. And when he catches me with a—another man, he beats us till we can’t move and sets the trailer on fire around us.” 

Art’s face twisted, grim. 

“My aunt pulled me out,” Raylan said. “My man didn’t make it. Well. That’s what I thought for eighteen years, until last night when you put his file in front of me and told me the boy I loved is not only not dead but is in fact a drug-running Nazi murderer.” 

Art pinched the bridge of his nose. “Jesus _Christ_.” 

Raylan almost laughed. “Yeah.” 

“So, what, you’re gay?” 

“No. I don’t know what I am. Does it matter?”

“What about Winona?” 

“I loved her. That was never a lie.” 

“She know about all this?” 

Raylan felt cold all over. “Art, I ain’t never told a soul.” 

“Yeah, you mentioned that.” Art threw up his hands. “Why wait till now to recuse yourself, when you’ve already gone and arrested the man?” 

“I didn’t—”

“Why not keep your mouth shut a little longer, see how much more you could screw this up?” Art visibly reined himself in, rubbing his mouth. “You sure he ain’t playing you?” 

“He ain’t.” 

“You two working some angle? What, you haul his competitors off to jail and then he claims you coerced him, gets his charges dropped, goes back to sitting pretty on top his newly expanded empire with a nice little cut for you, his own personal fed?” 

_“No_. It ain’t like that, I swear.” Raylan stepped forward, raised his hands. “He’s the one gave us the tip on the raid at Bowman’s. He’ll tell you anything you wanna know. His word’s as good as mine on this, Art, I mean it.” 

Art was shaking his head, looking at him like a stranger. “You have some goddamn nerve, Raylan.” 

“I couldn’t say anything,” Raylan said, nearly desperate. “Anyone else going down there, I couldn’t tell how that would’ve turned out. Someone might’ve gotten shot. I knew he’d talk to me.” 

“Oh, sure. Is talking all you did?” 

Raylan felt that like a slap, and he knew Art saw it. “Art, I’m trying to—I’m doing the best I can.”

A long hanging moment: like being a kid again, waiting for the fist to fall or not fall, nothing he could do about it either way. A coil of fury at the thought. Raylan breathed deeply and refused to flinch as Art studied him, unreadable.

“Get out of here,” Art said finally. “Take the day tomorrow, I don’t want to see you. Try not to do anything else stupid.”

Raylan exhaled. “Art—” 

“Save it.” 

Art opened the door to the conference room. “Rachel, bring Crowder in here. Tim, go get Vasquez.” He looked back at Raylan, pointing at him. “This ain’t finished.”

Raylan snorted. “No shit,” he said bitterly. 

Outside the closed office door, Boyd was straightening, spreading his hands, slipping on that toothy preacher smile as Rachel gestured him into the conference room. Raylan wanted to tell him to knock that shit off. Boyd glanced over as if he’d heard his thoughts—might as well have, Raylan was sure they were plain on his face—and as they looked at each other, for the first time Boyd’s mask slipped. For a moment Raylan was seeing him, no artifice or control, just him, like it used to be: he could have been standing in their kitchen making coffee, face glowing with that clearwater calm. Then he stepped out of sight.

“Jesus Christ,” Art said again. 

Raylan stared at his boots. Nobles had stamped dust into the patterned leather. 

“You want to be pissed, you wanna be disgusted with me, that’s fine,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ll live with it if I have to. But don’t you put that on him. I came to you to do this right, so you do it goddamn right, Art.”

“Don’t worry, Raylan,” Art said. “I know how to do my job.”

Raylan walked out of the office without looking back. He held out all the way to the elevator; that’s when he gave in, turning, searching for Boyd through all those panes of glass. He thought he caught a glimpse of his wild hair before the doors slid shut. 

He didn’t know how long he waited for Winona to pull up in her cute little car. By the third beer he started not caring. It was getting dark, anyway, and that was clue enough. 

Winona paused with her hands on the wheel for a moment when she caught sight of him. Then she stepped out of the car, heeled, graceful, and smacked the door shut before she marched up to the porch.

Somewhere around the second drink he’d imagined what she would do when she saw him, and it was exactly that. He was so charmed by it, and so proud to have guessed right, and so fucking miserable about all the rest, that he just leaned his head back against the wall and smiled at her.

She wasn’t any more immune than he was: an answering smile tugged at her face through the exasperation. “Raylan, what are you doing here?”

He smiled broader, and drained the beer. “I’d have thought it was obvious,” he said, slipping the empty back into its spot in the sixer and twisting the top off the fourth as he raised it. 

But Winona dropped her hands from her hips, frowning. “Raylan,” she said, “Are you all right?” 

He ran his tongue over his teeth. “Ain’t you gonna invite me in?” 

“You’re not stepping one foot in my house like this,” she said calmly. She slid her bag off her shoulder and folded into the rocking chair, legs crossed. Since he was sitting on the floor, this put her ankle squarely at eye level. She had a tiny birthmark just above her ankle bone; more than once he’d breathed a kiss to that exact spot on his languorous way northward.

“Raylan,” she said. He took a drink and looked at the ceiling. “What happened?” 

“Art told me to go home.” 

“So why are you sitting in front of my house?” 

“Gary seemed to have some objection to me sitting inside of your house.”

“I can’t imagine why.” 

Raylan huffed a laugh. Then he kept laughing, because it was so damn funny, Gary Hawkins being afraid Raylan might beat him up for stealing his wife, when Raylan hadn’t so much as laid a finger on the men who’d killed his husband. 

“Raylan,” Winona said softly, “what's going on?” 

He tilted the bottle back. She swung forward and plucked it out of his hands. A little messy: beer spilled on his mouth. He rubbed it away, rubbed his whole face, dug his fingers around his eyes, looked up at her. Her gold hair wisping out of its clip. 

“Winona, I have to tell you something,” he said. “You ain’t gonna like it.” 

She raised one brow, sitting back and sipping his beer. “Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I don’t think I’m too far out of practice being mad at you.” 

He draped an arm over his knee, twisted his ring. He hadn’t eaten, and the beer was working: a peachfuzz static haze was snaking its way in between his thoughts and the rest of him. It let him say, “You remember when you asked me about Boyd?”

“Oh, you mean, when I asked you about the name you cry out in your nightmares and you walked out of the house in the middle of the night and didn’t come back for two days, and then never said another word about it?” She set the bottle down hard on the little table. “Yeah, Raylan, I remember.”

“I thought he was dead.” 

“You _thought_ he was?”

“Turns out he ain’t.” Raylan felt one side of his mouth pull up. “I brought him in this morning.” 

“Wait, what? How did you—brought him in for what?” 

“Oh, he recited quite the list. Drug running, racketeering, murder, the like. No sodomy, though. No, ma’am. Although I suppose that’s fair, given it ain’t been a crime in Kentucky since—a couple months after I left, as it turns out, and I don’t know if he fucked other guys after me anyway,” Raylan said. “Though I don’t blame him if he did. I mean, _I_ did. Well, one guy.” 

Her face was twisting with shock, her eyes huge. “What?” she said softly.

He opened a new bottle. “Told you you weren’t going to like it.”

“Like— _like_ it?” She bit her lip, almost giddy with anger. “What, did you spend all this time sitting out here thinking of the worst possible way to say it?”

“No, it just came natural.” He took a long swallow.

“You are _unbelievable_.”

“Yeah,” Raylan said, “but at least I never died in front of you, only to turn up eighteen years later as a skinhead mobster and ask you to arrest me,” and then he put his hand over his face, breathing hard. 

“Goddamnit,” Winona said above him. Then she was sitting next to him. Her hand smoothing over his hair, familiar end-of-the-day traces of her floral perfume like another delicate touch on his skin. 

He got himself under control and glanced over. Tears were gleaming on her cheeks. He reached out to comfort her, instinctive. The look she gave him made him feel like he’d tried to butcher a frozen hog barehanded: a burning, seizing cold, fingers so numb the knife was as liable to cut him as the meat. 

He wrapped both hands around the sweating beer bottle. 

“You’re right,” he said quietly. “I shouldn’t have thrown it at you like that, like he’s just some—” He grit his teeth, tried again. “He was a good man when I married him. Getting better all the time. Now I don’t know what he is. What that makes me, for still—”

He stopped, took a gulp of beer instead. Like some fucked-up coming-out drinking game: drink every time you dig the hole deeper. He tried not to laugh.

“You’re an _asshole_ ,” Winona said.

“Boyd said so too,” Raylan admitted. “I know I am.”

“Just so I’m clear,” she said flatly. “You said _married?_ ”

Raylan tapped his ring clinking against the bottle, spread his hand to show her. “Ain’t no church wedding, you understand. No one standing there but us, for that matter. But we made vows.”

“I asked you about that ring, when we first took up,” Winona whispered. “You said it was just for luck. I asked you, _did it work?_ And you said, _met you, didn’t I?_ ” She swept her middle fingers under her eyes, careful of her makeup. “I thought it was sweet, that you were so—smooth about this silly thing. Now you’re telling me it’s a _wedding_ ring?”

“Winona, I’m sorry.”

“That thing never came off your finger all the time we were together.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Oh, you’re going to be,” she said. She heeled out of her shoes and pressed her palms to her eyes. “Tell me. Everything you should’ve told me twelve years ago, tell it to me right now.”

“I don’t know how,” he said. “I don’t want to do it wrong.”

“Come on, Raylan. How’d you ever tell people about me? You know how this story goes. You meet someone, you fall in love, you get down on one knee, and there you have it. So? Tell me. How’d you meet? You hit it off at the monthly Harlan County mixer for gay hillbillies or something?” 

“I ain’t gay.”

“We’re a little past that, Raylan.”

“You don’t understand,” he said tightly. “Our families, the way we grew up—I couldn’t be. And I _wasn’t_. I liked girls plenty. I thought that was enough.” 

Winona looked down. “What happened?” she said softly. 

Raylan drank. “The summer we were sixteen, we both ended up taking a job helping Joe Liscombe bring in his tobacco,” he said slowly. Not slow because he had to dredge the words: slow because he had to stop them pouring out. Boyd had dug it up that morning and it was still floating up in his mind, a cloud of silt in a stream. “Our daddies were pushing coke at the time, wanted the two of us helping out on it, but I would’ve cut off my own hand before I did anything for Arlo, and Boyd was trying to prove he didn’t need his daddy to make good money. Well of course Liscombe didn’t pay us for shit. Growing tobacco ain’t turned a profit in Harlan since my granddaddy’s day. And yet we showed up, at seven in the fucking morning, every day, for eight weeks.”

Hot goddamn days. The first real labor Raylan had ever done, his body and his mind aching all the time with the strain of working muscles he didn’t even know were in him. 

“You fell in love,” Winona said quietly. 

He scoffed. That’s how the story went. It felt so unequal to the truth. 

“I was hanging by a thread all the time in those days.” Raylan leaned his head against the wall. “Getting beat on at home. Getting in fights at school. I wanted out so bad it made me crazy. But that summer down in the field with Boyd—he was so fucking smart. Got to be that hearing him talk was the only thing worth getting out of bed for. And I—” he rubbed his mouth. “You know me, Winona. I don’t really know how to love people. I don’t now, and I didn’t back then. It scared the shit out of me, loving Boyd. Not just that we could get killed for it. The idea of letting _anyone_ near me. But he was just…there. Always, everywhere. Telling me yes. And after a while, I believed him.”

Winona was biting her lip, staring out into the shadowed hydrangeas. “You believed him. So you proposed,” she said. “Did you go down on one knee, like you did for me?” 

She meant it to be cutting, and it was: it cut them both. 

“I was young,” he said. “I thought we could make it.”

“You and him? Or you and me?”

“Oh, the thought never crossed my mind that you and me might not make it.” He smiled, lopsided. “Like I said. Young. Stupid.”

For a long moment, Winona didn’t speak. She took his left hand in both of hers, cradling it on her knees. 

“What happened?” she said quietly. 

Raylan closed his eyes. His limbs felt heavy, swimming, disjointed. He thought about telling her _I can’t do this again. Ask Art_. And then he looked at his hand in hers: her soft skin, her pink nails neat as seashells. He wanted more. Not once in the whole damn time had he missed her more than this.

He told her: Bo. Arlo. The fire. The lie.

Winona was crying again, thin silent tears following the tracks already laid down. She rubbed her cheek on her shoulder. 

“Why did you never tell me this?” she said. “Any of this?”

“How could I?”

“Did you think I couldn’t handle it? Or did you just not want me to know?”

“It’s not that.” 

“You didn’t, though.” 

“I didn’t want anyone to know,” he said. “I don’t want to know now. If you could’ve cracked me open and taken it out of me I would’ve asked you to in a heartbeat—”

“Raylan—”

“But you couldn’t,” he said, “because there was nothing to say. You can’t say what’s going on inside a grave, because you don’t know, that’s the point of burying something, so it doesn’t rot in the open. All you can do is take someone there and point. _That’s where the dead thing is_.”

“And even that you couldn’t manage.”

“I thought you deserved better, Winona! I wanted something better for you.”

“I wish you’d at least tried.”

He drained his beer and thunked it back down with the others. “Why? Ain’t nothing it could’ve saved for either one of us.”

“God _damn_ you, Raylan.” Winona climbed to her feet and stood with her back to him for a moment before she turned. “Nothing it could’ve saved? It could’ve saved us, maybe! Ever think of that? The whole time, this thing was between us, and I didn’t know, I only ever—ran into it, like walking into a wall in the dark, and then you’d turn the light on and say _see? Nothing there_.” She covered her face. “God damn you,” she said again, muffled. “You break my heart.” 

“Your mama did tell you I would.” 

“Did you ever love me?” she said. “Or were you just hiding.”

He said quietly, “You have to ask?” 

“ _Did_ you?” 

“Like crazy,” he said, trying to be angry. It kept sieving through him. “From the night we met. Even when I didn’t want to. Couldn’t help it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, Raylan?” 

“Winona, I was planning to never love another soul, after Boyd died. I thought I couldn’t. I thought that part of me got burned up too. And then I met you. I didn’t—” 

He shook his head. One hand on the wall, he came to his feet, only swaying a little, and then he sat carefully on the porch chair, motioned for Winona to sit across from him. After a pause, she folded down and crossed her arms. 

“You remember that one time,” he said softly, “after we’d been married a couple years, when I came back from hunting some asshole all the way to El Paso? And I was just…shaking. You remember what you did?” 

She shook her head.

“You took my boots right out of my hands,” he murmured, “put them on with your blue silk bathrobe. You pointed your hairbrush at me like a six-shooter, and then you said _hey there, cowboy,_ in the most ridiculous voice. And just like that, I couldn’t even remember what I’d been upset about.” 

He could still feel it: a seizing pang of sweetness, prickling all over his skin like carbonation. 

“I’d been in love before,” he said. “I thought I knew what it felt like. But with Boyd—he needed to know me, down to the bone. You just needed to know what I needed. I never knew it could be easy like it was with you. You were just so clear. Fearless. You didn’t doubt.”

Winona sighed and dragged the clip from her hair, rubbing her fingers against her scalp. 

“I used to wonder how you could love me like that and still make me feel so goddamn lonely,” she said at last. “I guess now I know.” 

“If I could be who you thought I was, I would have done it,” Raylan said. “I’d do it now. I’d get rid of all of it.” 

“Don’t you dare.” 

“I didn’t want this. I didn’t ask for any of it.” 

“None of us _ask_ for it, Raylan,” she said. “When’s your pain enough? You exhaust me.”

She did look tired. Her hair loose, her bare feet. She picked up the sixer of empties, leaned over the porch rail, and dumped it clattering into the recycling. 

“Where are you staying?” 

“Some motel off the 68.”

“Is it close enough for you to drive there safe with a six-pack of beer in you?” she said. “Because if you stay here I’m either going to sleep with you or kick your ass, and I’d rather just go to bed.” 

“Night’s young. We could go three for three.”

“Raylan,” she said.

He’d thought telling her would be the end of everything. But the end had already come and gone and come back round again, and he didn’t see a thing he could’ve done to change it. Maybe she was right. She usually was. If he’d been quicker to learn that, he’d be a different man.

“Don’t worry,” Raylan said, putting on his hat. “I’ll be fine.”

It was a long, numbing drive to make for the third time that day, and he was holding on by the skin of his teeth. Oddly enough, it was easier once he crossed the county line, since he didn’t have to think anymore. Turned out he still knew the way in the dark with his eyes closed. 

The tulip poplar curled over the mailbox. The moonlight glowing on the headstones in the yard. He could hear the porchlight buzzing as soon as he stepped out of the car: night peepers, crickets, cicadas, and that damn light fixture that had been loose since 1990. He slammed the car door. 

Helen stepped out on the porch in a nightgown and housecoat, shotgun leveled as she squinted into the night. Then she saw it was him. She lowered the gun with one hand and braced herself on the post with the other.

“Oh, no, go ahead,” Raylan said, nodding at the gun. “It’d be kinder.”

She snorted and put it aside entirely. “Raylan? What are you doing here?” 

“Not too much,” he said amiably. Then he raised a finger. “Although, come to think of it, I _did_ just arrest my dead husband this morning.” 

Her face tightening. A hollow red thud of satisfaction in his gut. “Oh, didn’t you hear?” he said lightly. “In what must be Harlan’s first recorded miracle, Boyd Crowder has risen from the grave.”

“Quit being so goddamn dramatic,” she said.

“I ain’t playing, Helen.” 

“I did it to protect you, you know that, boy.” She came down the steps so she didn’t have to look at him as she added, “If I’d had a son of my own I couldn’t’ve loved him more.”

“Well, it’s a good thing you never did,” he said. “I would hate to see how you ruined him too.”

“I didn’t want it. I didn’t plan it. Limehouse came up with it, and it seemed the only thing we could do—we were on the edge, honey. You seemed like you were knocking on death’s door with both hands.”

“You had no right.”

“I had every right, Raylan Givens,” she snapped, and then she hissed and covered her mouth and glared at him. “We going to just stand out here in the yard and squawk at each other?”

His hands were shaking. “Way I’m feeling, Helen,” he said carefully, “I step foot in that house right now and I’m going to burn it down.”

“At least come sit. You’re dead on your feet.”

“Quit stalling.” 

She threw up her hands. “Fine, Raylan. Let me hear it, then, go ahead! Never mind that I’m the reason you’re alive today!” 

“Alive?” He laughed, ragged, and put a hand over his mouth. “You think I been _living?_ You widowed me and you knew it. Every day for eighteen years, you’ve done that to me. To him.”

“Raylan—”

“What?” he demanded. Helen was crossing her arms in her thin coat, face tight with unhappiness. “Did you think I’d be scared straight, go live a normal life? Be _happy?_ Well, I tried. I married a woman I loved and I did my goddamn best and yet here we are, back at the beginning. And for what? So no one had to know Bo’s son was queer? So he could keep his pissant coke pushers in line a little longer? So Arlo didn’t spend the rest of his miserable life in prison where he belonged?” 

“I wasn’t going to watch you get yourself killed over that boy, not when I could stop it. They would’ve strung you up and you know it.”

“Well, Helen, they’re dead,” he said flatly. “They been dead for years. Any peace you made didn’t need keeping then. So why didn’t you tell me? I want to know. Why?” 

“It was too late.” 

“Bullshit.” 

“You were engaged by the time Boyd got back from the army.” She eased herself down to sit on the bottom step, fishing a cigarette and lighter out of her coat. “You’d made it out. What do you think would’ve happened? Would you have, what, dropped your whole life to ride back to Harlan on your white horse, save him from himself? Raylan, you don’t know what he was like back then.”

“No I don’t. Do I.”

“He was beyond wild. Out of control. He’d come round here to visit with me and your mama, pay his respects at your grave, and then he’d go hold someone down on the engine of a car while it was still running because they owed him money.”

Raylan bit the inside of his lip hard. “You should have told _him_.”

Helen flicked her ash into the bushes and put her head in her hands. “And then what? You would’ve lived happily ever after?” she said tiredly. “Raylan, honey, you two were a danger to each other anywhere.”

That slid into him like a boning knife. He shook his head slowly, kept shaking it. 

“You have no idea what were to each other,” he said, his voice bone-hollow. “You thought just the fucking got us killed. Helen, I _married_ him,” and somehow saying that took his knees out from under him when it hadn’t before, folded him down to sit next to her on the steps before he fell over. 

“What do you mean, married?” she said softly. 

“The hell do you think I mean?” He pushed his hat back, rubbed his hands over his face. “The mine came down on us, and after, we went home and washed in the creek out back because the shower was broken. And we were standing there in that cold fucking water, and I felt I was shaking right off the skin of the earth. And he swore we’d never go back down there. Not together. Not apart. We said, that ain’t how either one of us is going to die. The way he looked at me—I’d never even imagined we could promise each other something like that. So I asked him. And he said yes.”

She sat for a moment, the cherry burning down on her cigarette. She took a long drag, blew it out away from him. “I didn’t know that,” she said quietly. 

“We went and stood up under that big old live oak at the edge of the meadow. June 13, 1990. You should’ve been there,” Raylan said. “Maybe then you would’ve known better.”

“Maybe,” she said. “That was two years before you left.”

“We should’ve left then.”

“Why didn’t you? I gave you that money.”

“It wasn’t enough, not for both of us, not with him having to look after Bowman at first. And then mama got sick. It made sense to stick it out doing construction up in Cumberland for a little longer, get a little more saved away. We were almost there.”

Helen drew in a shaking breath, dragged the back of her hand across her eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said after a minute.

He closed his eyes. “I _loved_ you, Helen.”

“I know.” She put a hand on his neck and he shook it off. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t get to be sorry.”

“Well, I am.”

They sat there, the porch light throwing their shadows into the yard. All the night noises, a thousand small lives buzzing on unfazed. He was trying to hold onto his anger. For years he’d kept it neat and close, ready to be drawn and holstered as needed, but something about that rooftop in Miami had hamstrung him, and all day he’d felt it getting worse: fury slipping through his fingers, surging and fading out of his control. He was just so tired. 

Helen ground out the butt of her cigarette. “Arlo tried to burn this house down too, did you know that?” 

Raylan shook his head. 

“A couple days after you left. He didn’t get very far, he was too drunk to light a match. Your mama was still up in Nobles, thank God. I found him in the kitchen with a can of gasoline and a whole book of broken matches on the floor around him.”

“What’d you do?”

“Locked him in his truck, took his keys, and slashed the tires.” She wrapped her coat tighter. “I think he thought it was the old house. His old man’s house.”

Raylan leaned against the rail and closed his eyes. They’d lived with his grandaddy the preacher for a few years when he was little. All he remembered of that house was a sunlit window seat. He’d curled up there with his mother once, in a nest of white bedsheets she was folding. Her singing so soft it sounded like it was coming from the house itself, part of the same sound made by the air drifting in through the half-open sash, the locusts droning in the oaks, the earth moving against itself way underground. A sound that held the world inside it, all the living and the dead. It was his oldest memory. Or else something he’d invented for want of having it. Arlo razed that house when Raylan was fifteen. He wanted something better for his family, he’d said. In its place: the house that cocaine built. He’d hated his father too, Raylan knew.

“Come on, sweetheart,” Helen said softly. “Let’s get you inside.”

She had to hold onto him as he went into the house swaying: boozed, exhausted, heartsick. They didn’t make it past the living room. He shoved his boots off and pressed his face into the couch. Helen took off his gun and badge, put a blanket over him.

“Go to sleep,” she said, like he was a kid. 

“You gonna?”

A liquid sound: she was pouring herself a drink. “In a little while. Sleep, honey.” 

He closed his eyes. He was still thinking of the old house. And then he was home, in their trailer in the hills. The night was beautiful. They had all the windows open. There was moonlight furred on the long grass in the field, shadows quaking and reforming, Dolly wandering off after some new scent. And as they sat in the doorway Boyd said again that they should do something with it, their bit of good land. Raylan didn’t want to. There was a hot fist of terror in his belly at the thought of digging it up. Something bad was going to happen. But then they were in the kitchen. Boyd was fiddling with the radio antenna. A clear night. They could have their pick of stations, maybe even one as far as Nashville, Boyd thought: then music filling the room, spilling like light out of the windows. _Believe me when I tell you, you can love me like a man_. Boyd’s hands tugging at Raylan’s hands, his waist, their bare feet knocking. Boyd laughing and laughing. He was happy. He wanted to stay up and dance, play cards, talk, fuck, talk more. He put coffee on the stove. Raylan wanted something bigger than that—bigger than just being alive. He wanted to go right through Boyd like a door into the world where there was nothing in the field to be afraid of. But he didn’t have words for it. So he turned Boyd back into his arms and kissed him, slow and sweet as he could. Boyd rubbed his neck, his ribs, smiling. Then the door was banging open and Arlo was standing there, face twisted up in a snarl, the baseball bat already raised, Boyd throwing his arm in front of Raylan, Raylan’s hand going for a gun that wasn’t there yet— 

Raylan startled awake, fist tight on Helen’s wrist. She’d been reaching for him. He was breathing hard, his heart jackrabbiting in his throat. 

“You were crying out,” she said softly.

“He wanted coffee,” Raylan mumbled. “Boyd. That’s why the stove was on. One of us pulled a curtain down on it when we fell. That’s how the fire started.” 

“Oh, honey.” 

Helen’s face was fallow, creased with the furrows a sour life had left. She was old now, he realized. He softened his grasp on her sleeve—all the asking he could bear—and she smoothed the tears from his face, pressed her hands gently on his cheeks. He looked up at the dark ceiling. One dim yellow square glowing from the oven light in the kitchen.

“What’d you put in the box?” His voice was wet and ragged. Helen frowned in confusion. “Ava said you buried a box in my grave.” 

“It’s late, Raylan. We done enough tonight.”

“I ain’t going to sleep again,” he said. “Dig it up with me or I’ll do it myself.” 

She watched him for a long minute. “Come on,” she said finally. 

He was still kind of drunk: couldn’t find his boots, stumbled outside without them. Helen pulled a shovel from the shed, the flashlight beam skewing wild in the trees when she clutched it in her elbow. He curled his toes against the dew. Dawn was still a good half hour out, the air chill and blunt and close, the sky a dark blue bowl turned over on the hills. 

Helen hefted the shovel over Raylan’s grave, but he took it from her. No sense dragging it out to make a point when he could do it in half the time. The work heated him from the inside, his plumed breath hanging bright in the flashlight beam as he heaved the dirt against Arlo’s headstone. 

“Just had to go the whole six feet for your little fake funeral, didn’t you.” 

“It wasn’t all fake, Raylan. Not for me, not for your mama. You still hadn’t woken up.”

“Not fake for Boyd neither,” he said bitterly. “Nor Ava.”

“No,” Helen said quietly. 

She lit a cigarette, a brief orange gleam on her face. The shovel blade sank deep in the black earth. His feet numb with cold. The gray dawn lightening all around them. Helen switched off the flashlight. 

When the shovel clanged against a small metal box, Raylan leaned down to brush the dirt from it and knew it right away for what it was. 

He went to his knees in the hole. 

“Everything burned,” he whispered. 

“Arlo took it. He thought there was money in it,” Helen said tiredly. “He was standing there trying to pry it open with his bare hands when I drove up.” 

She ground the cigarette out on the bastard’s headstone and leaned down to grab Raylan’s elbow, and together they hauled him out of the grave. It was clumsy going. He had the box clutched tight against his belly. 

The green metal had warmed under his touch. He pressed his hands on it like it was a sleeping limb he could chafe awake. His head was pounding.

“Were you just going to leave it there?”

“I had it in my will to dig it up and give it to you.” 

He laughed and laughed. “I never knew my Aunt Helen was such a damn coward.”

“Yeah, well.” She sat heavily next to him. “All my life, all these hard Harlan years, turns out I’ve only ever really been afraid of one thing.” 

“It happened. It could’ve been done with. You could’ve told me. I could’ve saved him. Now it ain’t never gonna be over.” 

Helen grasped his face to make him look at her. 

“You listen to me, Raylan Givens,” she said harshly. “You didn’t do nothing wrong. I should’ve said that a long time ago.” 

He pulled away, and she let her hands drop. He felt numb, brutal. There was a new padlock on the box. The old key was long gone, anyway: they’d kept it in the junk drawer of a kitchen that no longer existed. 

“Open it,” he said, and Helen pulled a little metal key out of the pocket of her old coat and folded it into his palm. 

She’d sealed everything up in a plastic bag to protect it from the damp. Raylan scrubbed the dirt off his hands. The newest pictures were on top: the sunrise coming up through the notch in the ridge on that last hunting trip. Raylan’s sleeping face mostly covered in blankets, one orange ribbon of light laid down over his brow. Embers. Dolly swimming, shade-dappled. Ava and Bowman shooting pool. Frost scrawled wildly over the windshield of Boyd’s old pickup. The two of them with Lyall Olsen and Gene Powell standing in front of the house they’d just finished framing. The trailer at dusk, a blue shadow in the kitchen window. Raylan at the sink, shirtless, skinny, smiling over his shoulder. 

“There’s so many,” he said blankly. “I forgot there were so many.”

“He loved that Polaroid.”

“I was trying to tell him something, giving it to him.” Raylan thumbed through them: winter, fall, summer, spring, winter— “ _Boyd, I don’t want to be so afraid_. And he heard me. He always heard what I couldn’t say.” 

Sunrise. Sunrise. A rabbit blurring in the field, Dolly tearing after it. Four years of their life, just piled there. 

“It was me insisted on the locker. I had nightmares about people finding these. We fought about it. In the end—” Raylan nearly laughed, the sudden memory welling up fresh as water— “in the end he came home with the damn box, slammed it down, and told me _fine, have it. I’ll just take so many pictures it won’t fucking close._ ”

“Idiots.” Helen rubbed her eyes. “You were so young.”

Fall again. Summer again. Their wedding day, sunlight feather-soft and green sifting through the leaves, their careful suits. 

His face was wet. He felt stripped naked as a mountain, huge slabs of grief torn out of him, laid bare for the vultures—only nobody had profited off this. Not a goddamn soul.

The photo at the bottom of the pile, the very first one they’d ever taken: Raylan looking at the camera. He’d just turned nineteen. It was their first winter out of high school. They hadn’t finished fixing up the trailer but they were practically living there just the same, and even though it was colder than a witch’s tit in there it was better than any other place Raylan had ever been: the snow folding them in, in their house, in their bed, their own little cup of warmth. It was a couple days out from Christmas still but he couldn’t wait any longer to give Boyd the Polaroid he’d wrapped in newspaper and stuffed under the bed. 

In the picture the white light coming through the window blurred half Raylan’s face. It made him look even younger. Sweet, soft: the boy Ava named her baby for. The boy Dion should’ve met. The boy Winona should’ve known. 

All the anger he’d lost hold of flared back up in him, a bed of coals under a bellows. His hands shook. That fucking coward. He could’ve saved himself, and he hadn’t, and it had ruined him. He’d been no better than Boyd, doing what he had to to survive. Burying everything dead in him so what was left could keep walking around, and for what? He’d spent eighteen years standing on the other side of a grave from everyone he knew. Now it was killing him to keep it down. And damn him, but he did want to live. He always had. He’d whittled himself down to that want over and over.

The boy kept staring out of the picture, unmoving: trying to smile a little, to soften the fear in his mouth, to hide his frail savage happiness. Boyd had asked, gentle, serious, _Raylan, may I?_ And so Raylan had nodded, and kept looking as the camera raised, his face burning and skin prickling, on and on for what felt like forever, giving Boyd every answer he didn’t have words for. 

On his knees in his own grave dirt, Raylan found that he couldn’t look at that boy and hate him. He’d deserved to be saved. 

The anger flooded out of him, left him dizzy, his ears ringing. Some massive tide was rising in him. The photos silent in the grave all that time, Boyd standing over them grieving, blood on his hands. The bones, his mama and Arlo and his grandparents and their parents and theirs, sighing. Helen alone in that echoing house. Limehouse in his wary kingdom. Ava tending her busy garden. Raylan wasn’t the only one answering to this sorrow. A bell struck a long damn time ago, its pealing still moving through them in waves: mist rising up off the grass, exhaling, every wordless thing waking up in the earth, in him, a nearly audible light, a hum that went on and on. 

Raylan drew a breath and found he had to wrench it in, hard, wet, ugly gasps, like someone shot. Helen wrapped her arm around his shoulders. She was saying something. At first he thought she was hushing him, but then her voice came through.

“Go on ahead, honey,” she crooned. “It’s okay. You’re all right.” 

Raylan climbed into his narrow old bed and slept until noon. Showered, put on jeans and an old sweatshirt Helen had lying around from some old beau. He was hungover as shit. He sat on the porch for a long time with a cup of coffee, listening to the birds. 

Then he went inside to the old phone hanging on the wall outside the kitchen. He fished in his wallet for the number written on a scrap of paper, leaned his forehead against the doorframe, and dialed before he lost his nerve. Shoulder against the wall, curled away from his aunt’s ears, fingers in the twisted-up cord, he probably looked like the lovesick teen he could never let himself be seen to be. He felt old: worn through like a rag gone nearly translucent with use.

Ringing. Then: a bright rattle of noise. “Hello?” Dion said.

“Hey, it’s me. Raylan.” 

“Cowboy!” Rumba blaring out of some shop as he passed. “Got to be honest, man, I wasn’t expecting to ever hear from you again. What, you decide, _fuck Kentucky, I’mma stay in Miami and hit up that one hot dude again?_ ”

Raylan smiled. “Not quite.” 

“Your loss.” 

“I know. I was dropped on the head as a child. Only explanation.”

Dion laughed. “What’s up, man?”

Raylan rubbed his forehead. “You headed to work?”

“Yeah, why?” 

“I never did ask what you do.” 

“Man, you cruised me on the bus and then we fucked. You know I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend or anything, right?”

“Seem to recall quite a bit of talking got done before the fucking,” Raylan said dryly. He swallowed. “I’m not—I just—you listened. I didn’t know how to thank you.”

“Okay,” Dion said after a second. “Yeah, I’m headed to work. Give you three guesses.” 

“Mm. Not a bartender, not this early. Lawyer?” Boyd had thought about that, once upon a time. He could’ve eaten those Miami sharks alive.

“Strike one,” Dion said. 

“Circus performer.” 

“Mm-mm. Music teacher.” 

“That was my next guess.” 

“Keyboard in my living room should’ve been a dead giveaway.” 

“Well, I had much more important things to be investigating.” 

Dion laughed again. “Raylan,” he said, “What do you want?” 

Raylan propped his hip against the wall, looked out of the window down the hill, long grass waving. He ought to cut it before he left. “That thing we talked about,” he said. “When I said something happened to me, and you wanted to know what it felt like to kill them for it, only I didn’t? Well, I found out.”

Dion sucked in a breath. “What? How? Did you—”

“My man told me. My—my husband. Turns out he did what I couldn’t.” 

“Shit, Raylan.” A pause. “Shit. So what did he say?” 

“He said it was like setting off explosives down a mine. Like you’re safe in your own universe for one second, and everything else is on fire. And then it’s over.” Raylan wished he’d written it down. He didn’t think he could ever ask Boyd to say it again. “That what you were hoping for?”

“I don’t know what I hoped,” Dion said softly. Cars whooshing by him. “Hell of a way to say thank you for a one-night stand.”

“Thank you,” Raylan said quietly. 

“Look, man, I got to get on the bus.”

“There ain’t no bus there yet. Two more minutes, Dion. Come on.” 

Dion paused. “Your man’s in jail, huh.”

“He is now. I put him there.”

“Jesus. What are you going to do?”

“What can I do?”

Dion snorted. “Quit. Move back to Miami. Hell, move anywhere. They got cops everywhere, man. Or, fuck, I don’t know. Be a realtor for all I care.” His voice was hard. “You’re alive. You don’t owe shit.”

“I’d be a terrible realtor.” Raylan smiled. “You really ain’t from Harlan.” 

“What’s that mean?” 

“Nothing. I’m glad.” He rubbed his bare toe on the edge of the linoleum. They’d never talked about Miami, him and Boyd. Raylan pictured it anyway: driving out to the beaches that weren’t such a fucking tourist trap, running down to the bodega at two in the morning for ice cream and condoms, watching the Marlins flub another season. Forty years old and holding hands on the street. Like people.

“You ever wonder why I went with you that night?” he asked Dion.

“Well, I’d assumed it was either my dashing good looks or my charming drunk freakout, but from your tone I’m guessing not,” Dion said dryly. 

“I spent so long being a coward,” he said. “I didn’t want to die like that.” 

“Hey,” Dion said. “Hey. You didn’t.” 

“No,” Raylan said. With his thumb he nudged the rings on his finger, the silver horseshoe flashing in the sunlight, the bone nearly glowing. “I didn’t.”

**Author's Note:**

> Story title from misheard lyrics to [Sam Amidon’s “As I Roved Out.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCHcH2xCBlE)
> 
> The song in the dream is [Bonnie Raitt’s “Love Me Like a Man.”](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7u0bBrLZsE)
> 
> Thank you for reading!


End file.
